“Sir, I don’t think there’s time for all that. There are innocent hostages down there. There’s a woman they’re torturing. They’re trying to launch the missile, and maybe they can do it and maybe they—”
“Son,” the colonel interrupts. “If it were up to me, we’d have been down that hole faster than shit through a goose, but I follow orders. You get my drift?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Because I’m ordering you to get the hell off that mountain and make your way to the base camp. You’ll do us no good if you get killed. I’ll alert our perimeter. Give me your E.T.A.”
“It’s going to be a while, sir.”
“What does that mean, Sergeant?” The colonel has abandoned his avuncular tone. Now, it’s all business.
“I have a detour to make.”
“Sergeant! I want you off that mountain. I want you off the missile base. Do you read me?”
“Five by five, sir.”
“Good. Now, get over here where you’ll be of some use.”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“What!”
“I’ve got to go back into the silo.”
“Sergeant!”
“I promised someone,” Jack Jericho says. “One of the hostages.”
Jericho stares across the pouring water of the spillway, pondering what he has just done. Refused a direct order, for one thing. The only comforting thought is that he can’t be court-martialed if he’s killed by Brother David’s maniacs. For a moment, he listens to the colonel yammering at him, then looks down at his filthy t-shirt and brushes at a pink spot, absent-mindedly trying to wipe it off.
The spot moves.
Jericho brushes at it again.
It moves again, centering on his sternum.
Jericho looks up. At the end of the catwalk, a commando aims a laser-sighted Mauser 66 at him. Ping! A bullet ricochets off the steel railing. The phone is still locked in Jericho’s grip. He can hear the colonel screaming, “Sergeant! You’ll be court-martialed.”
Jericho tucks and rolls across the catwalk. Ping! Ping! Two more misses. Jericho scrambles to his feet and begins running to the far side of the catwalk, zig-zagging away from the rifleman.
“I’ll lock the cell at Leavenworth myself!” comes the colonel’s muffled voice.
Jericho stops short. A second commando lies in the prone shooting position on this end of the catwalk, too. A shot misses. Then another. Jericho jams the phone into his rucksack and vaults over the railing. Kicking at the air, he tumbles into the spillway twenty feet below where he sinks into the cascading water. The force carries him under, smashes him against the bottom of the concrete spillway, then carries him to the surface and into the narrow aqueduct that curls down the slope. He sucks in a greedy breath of air and is swept under again. In seconds, he has traveled hundreds of feet down the aqueduct, and he can no longer hear the gunshots.
-42-
Let It Blow
Reams of paper spill out of the console computer in the launch control capsule. Eyes bleary, James works at the keyboard, occasionally lifting the pages to examine the scrolling numbers.
“Can you get the code or not?” David asks, his tone querulous.
“I th-ink I can, Bro-ther Davy,” James says, playing dumb, dragging out the words, having some fun.
“What’s taking so long?”
James takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, then turns toward David. “It doesn’t help if you keep pestering me every fifteen minutes. Aren’t you supposed to have the patience of Job?”
“Right now, I have the wrath of Zeus!”
James turns back to his work. “Pagan. I knew it would come to this.”
David slides his flight chair down the railing. He knows when it’s best to let James alone. Behind him, Rachel keeps a watch over Susan, whose hands are cuffed behind her. Owens, also cuffed, sleeps on the floor, his head slumped against the capsule wall. “Let’s play, ‘Imagine,’” David says to Susan.
She looks at him through sullen eyes. “I’m tired of your games.”
“No, no, no. You must play with me. What do you imagine they’re doing at STRATCOM right now? And at Cheyenne Mountain and at the Military Command Center?”
“They’re talking about you,” Susan says. “You’re the center of attention. Does that make you happy?”
“Of course. But what are they saying? What are they doing?”
“Deciding how to kill you without killing us. Figuring out if you can launch the missile or detonate it if you can’t launch.” Her tone takes on an angry edge. “Trying to figure what makes a schizo like you tick.”
“Changing your diagnosis, eh doctor?”
“No. Just adding paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur.”
That brings a smile of mock disbelief. “Paranoid? My dear, doctor, as you have just acknowledged, the entire United States military is trying to kill me.”
Naked, soaking wet and shivering, Jack Jericho peers out of the underbrush near a concrete pillar of the aqueduct. The temperature has plunged as the sun settles below Rattlesnake Hills to the west. Over his head, water roars down the elevated aqueduct and around the missile facility.
“Guess I needed a bath, anyway,” Jack Jericho says to himself. Except for the survival knife strapped to his ankle, he could be Adam in the Garden of Eden. He wrings out his clothes and tests the cellular phone. The little green light clicks on, but he doesn’t feel like talking to Colonel Zwick and having his prison sentence increased.
Jericho hears a rustling in the underbrush, turns and looks straight into a glaring flashlight.
The man’s voice is urgent, perhaps a little afraid. “Who are you? Identify yourself.”
Jericho shields his eyes and sees a commando holding a flashlight in one hand, an Uzi in the other. The flashlight is pointed at Jericho’s face, the Uzi at his gut. “They call me Brother John,” he calmly tells the man.
The flashlight works its way down Jericho’s body. “You’re out of uniform,” the commando says.
“Occupational hazard, but I’m clad in God’s own garment.”
The commando regards him suspiciously. “I don’t recognize you, Brother John.”
“I am a recent convert, but I believe I have seen you at evening vespers.” Holding his breath, hoping to hell there are evening vespers.
The commando moves closer, studying Jericho. “Then you should have no trouble telling me the hidden meaning of the sixth seal of Revelations.”
“The sixth seal,” Jericho repeats, nodding appreciatively. Buying time now. “One of my favorite passages.”
“Mine, too.”
“Do you know it by heart?” Jericho asks.
“Who does not?”
“Indeed,” Jericho says.
“‘I watched as he broke the sixth seal,’” the commando recites with appropriate fervor. “‘The sun turned black as a funeral pall and the moon all red as blood, and the stars fell to earth, like figs shaken down by a gale. The sky vanished and every mountain and island was moved from its place.’”
“Sounds like a hell of a storm.”
“Do you joke about such things?” The commando moves even closer.
“No, I just thought the meaning was obvious.”
“Of course. But the hidden meaning. What does Brother David teach us?”
“Oh, that,” Jericho says. Their faces are just inches apart. “That’s easy. Do unto others… ”
Jericho viciously head-butts the commando, breaking the man’s nose with an explosion of cartilage and blood. “Before they do unto you!”
The man falls backward and writhes on the ground, spitting foamy blood. Jericho picks up the Uzi and points it at him. “I want your clothes. We’ll finish the Sunday school class later.”