Trapped.
He freezes and listens.
A squeak, then a scraping sound, then another squeak, only louder.
“Jeptha, did you hear that? In heaven’s name, what—”
“Rats! Satan’s own pets. I’m not going in there.”
Jericho stiffens but as the sound gets closer, he recognizes it. A moment later, Ike the ferret is nuzzling his leg. “Here boy,” he whispers, grabbing the animal and placing him in the deep pocket of his fatigues.
Above him, the two commandos continue to argue. “Brother David ordered us to find the infidel. He won’t care if rats or elephants are in that—”
A noise overhead interrupts them. The two commandos look up to see
a Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter dipping low over the base. Two video cameras are attached to the chopper’s skids. “Brother David promised extra rations for the man who shoots it down!” one yells.
They both whoop and run off through the river bed, firing wildly in the air, fruitlessly chasing the copter as it banks and runs through a series of well-practiced evasive maneuvers.
Jericho crawls the short distance to the opening, tumbles from the outlet pipe onto the ground, then scuttles across the river bed toward a stand of pine trees. His shoulder is swollen and throbs at the joint. He is grimy and sweaty and nearing exhaustion. He is just yards away from cover when he stops short.
Must be dreaming.
Hallucinating.
First the mine shaft. Then this.
In front of him, above him actually, as he is on all fours, is a girl of about ten. She wears a yellow sun dress with blue polka dots. Her blonde hair is in pigtails. She waves a small plastic wand over Jericho’s head, leaving a trail of bubbles that float in the soft breeze.
“Do you love the Lord?” the girl asks.
“What?”
“Do you love the Lord and accept the Word?”
Jericho is speechless.
“‘Cause if you don’t,” the little girl tells him, dipping the wand into a blue plastic bottle, “you’ll get boils, your teeth will rot, and vultures will eat your liver.”
“Is that all?”
“No, then you’ll croak, and the fires of hell will melt your eyeballs.”
As the bubbles float above him, Jericho turns over and flops onto his back, breathing hard. “Just now,” he says, “that would be an improvement.”
-36-
Threatening the General
The Big Board at STRATCOM shows live video of the 318th Missile Squadron, taken as the Kiowa recon helicopter sweeps over the base. General Corrigan, Colonel Farris, F.B.I. Agent Hurtgen and a circle of military aides watch as the commandos race helter-skelter below the chopper, blasting away with automatic weapons.
“Small arms fire only,” Colonel Farris sniffs. “No organization, no interlocking fire patterns.”
“We lost a nuclear missile to the military equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” F.B.I. Agent Hurtgen says.
“They were good enough to take over the base, weren’t they?” the general asks. No one answers the question, which was addressed mostly to himself anyway. “Their training was fine for what they had to do.”
“But they planned to launch the missile before we could respond,” Agent Hurtgen says. “Now we can respond, and they likely didn’t train for that.”
“Right,” the general agrees.
“But either way, they’d still have to defend themselves,” Colonel Farris says, puzzled. “They’d have to fight their way out whether they launched or not.”
“Not if they never intended to get out of the hole,” General Corrigan says. The assemblage seems to think it over. Kamikaze warriors of God. Not much difference between them and fundamentalist Shiites in the Middle East, except these guys aren’t fooling around with car bombs or plastiques.
On the Big Board, a live aerial shot shows a commando standing in the open on the gravel road that runs from the front gate to the security building. The Air Force officers cannot make out Matthew’s face, wouldn’t know him if they could. But there is something about this one. He stands motionless, his feet spread to shoulder width, as he raises a tube to his shoulder.
“Shit!” Colonel Farris blurts out. “He’s got a Stinger.”
There is a puff of smoke and an animated blur of yellow. The video from the chopper is up-linked to a satellite, then down-linked to a ground station, where it is fed through underground lines to Offut Air Force Base. Fast motion, such as a race horse or a heat-seeking Stinger missile appears as a streaking blur of color.
The ground tilts away at a sudden angle as the chopper banks in an evasive maneuver, but a second later, there is an explosion of orange flame and the Big Board goes blank.
For a long moment, none of the officers says a word. Finally, the general speaks. “We’ll need to assess enemy numbers and weaponry before there’s an assault.” He turns to Colonel Farris. “Has Intelligence analyzed the satellite photos?”
The colonel nods to an aide who hits a button on his console, and the Big Board flashes with a black-and-white still shot of the missile base shot from a low-orbiting satellite. Enemy commandos have been electronically enhanced and numbered. “Fifty to sixty men above ground. We don’t know what they’ve got in the hole.”
The Big Board flashes to a second shot, a close-up of the open missile silo. The shiny titanium shroud of the PK missile can be seen, but the rest is in shadows.
“Any demands yet?” the general asks.
“Nothing. And no word on the ambassadors.”
“They could be dead.”
The colonel shrugs. “Would make our decisions easier, wouldn’t it?”
General Corrigan gives the colonel a sharp look as a satellite photo of Base Camp Alpha flashes onto the Big Board. “When one of your staff takes early retirement and sells his story to television, you’ll probably be sorry you said that.”
Colonel Farris flinches. He now regrets loosening his tie, treating the general with excessive familiarity. General Corrigan still has his fresh, crisply laundered look, his silver hair neatly in place. The general wasn’t finished chastising Farris, but an aide interrupts and hands him a red telephone. “It’s Morning Star, sir. He’s asked for you by name.”
General Corrigan’s glance shoots the aide a question.
“Voice analysis confirms Morning Star is a white male,” the aide says, “probable age mid-thirties, most likely raised west of the Mississippi.”
“That narrows it down,” Agent Hurtgen says derisively, as the general takes the phone.
“General Corrigan here. Who is this?”
“Hello Hugh,” the voice says. “Congratulations on getting that second star. Lord knows, you deserve it.”
“Who the hell is this?”
“I understand Cliff has an appointment to the Academy. You must be so proud. And how is Edna?”
General Corrigan stands looking into the phone as if trying to divine the identity of the caller. Colonel Farris whispers to an aide. “I’ll bet the bastard even knows about the barmaid in Stuttgart.”
Finally, the general says, “What is it you want?”
“Salvation for all eternity.”
Eternity is not on General Hugh Corrigan’s mind just now. Making it to retirement without presiding over a nuclear holocaust is a higher priority. “What do you want from me?” he asks.
In the launch control capsule at the 318th Missile Squadron, David sits in the commander’s red-cushioned flight chair, his feet propped up on the console. Speaking into the headset, he says, “A word of caution. Don’t do anything foolish, Hugh. I imagine Delta is on its way from Bragg, and a contingent of SEAL’s from San Diego, maybe the black hat Red Cell team, too. Then There’s the F.B.I. Hostage Response Unit, Army Night Stalkers, Green Berets, the 82nd Airborne, and probably the A.T.F. just for good measure. I’ll bet some bright boy in D.C. wants to send in the flame throwers. I have women and children here, Hugh, just like Waco. You want another Texas barbecue?”