“Sergeant, you surprise me,” a male voice says with a hint of amusement.
At first, he thinks it’s Colonel Zwick, calling to give him hell. But it’s Brother David. He knows where I am, Jericho thinks, feeling trapped, a rat in a maze. Scanning equipment picked up his earlier call to the Colonel.
“Are you there, Sergeant Jack Jericho from Sinkhole, West Virginia? Why haven’t you high-tailed it like some scared rabbit? Flight would be so much more consistent with your profile.”
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” Jericho fires back. He had wanted to stay quiet and now curses himself for letting the bastard get to him. Over the phone, he hears David’s laughter.
In the launch control capsule, David hits the speaker button and nods to Rachel, who uses an Uzi to prod Captain Pete Pukowlski toward the microphone. “Someone wants to talk to you,” David says.
Pukowlski shuffles to the console, his feet shackled by leg irons, his hands cuffed behind him. “Jericho, give yourself up.”
“Puke, that you?” an astonished Jericho replies. “I thought you were dead.”
Captain Pukowlski reddens. “You will address me as ‘sir.’ I am still your captain, Jericho.”
“Not any more. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”
“The fuck are you talking about? That’s insubordination.”
David pushes Pukowlski away from the microphone. “Actually, it’s ‘Invictus.’ It was intended for me, the sergeant’s way of rejecting determinism. But he is wrong. His fate, like yours and mine, is sealed.”
“We make our own fate,” Jericho says. “We have free will.”
“Sergeant, you are so much more interesting than these uniformed eunuchs like Pukowlski, who couldn’t captain the H.M.S. Pinafore. I’d like to know more about you, Jericho.”
“Go screw yourself.”
“Did you sit on some mountaintop in the Appalachians reading poetry while your countless cousins picked lice from their scalps?”
“Let the hostages go and I’ll answer all your questions.”
“Do you really believe all that whimsical claptrap about free will?”
“I don’t believe it’s all preordained.”
“Oh, but it is. An Apocalypse followed by the thousand year reign of the Savior.”
“With you his right-hand man.”
“I am the vessel chosen to set in motion the forces that cannot be restrained. I can no more resist my fate than a wave can resist being driven against the shore.”
“That’s a cop out. We’re all captains of our own destiny.”
“As I suspected, the son of miners and moonshiners is a poet at heart. Look at your life, Jericho. If you are right, if your fate has not been sealed, look how abysmally you have exercised your free will.”
“I’m about to change that.”
“Yes, you are. You’re about to die. Oh, I wish I had time to spar with you. We could go a few rounds of dueling bards. Reason versus belief, rationality versus spirituality. But duty calls.”
“Meaning what?”
“Simply this, Sergeant. If you don’t surrender at once, I shall have to kill the captain.”
Jericho continues crawling through the tube. “Promises, promises,” he says into the phone.
“Jericho!” Pukowlski screams.
“Ah, perhaps I’ve chosen the wrong hostage,” David says. He moves to the capsule’s back wall and roughly grabs Dr. Susan Burns, yanking her out of the chair. Her hands are cuffed behind her, and she still wears the missileer’s blue jumpsuit. “Sergeant, there’s someone else who wants to say hello.”
“Jericho, just take care of yourself,” Susan says, her voice breaking. “Don’t worry about me.”
David pulls the microphone away. “Sorry, sergeant, she’s the next to die.”
Jericho strains not to lose it, not to show emotion, but he fails. “Hear my word, dirtbag! You hurt that woman, and I’m going to gut you like a barnyard pig. I’m going to skin you and nail your hide to the barn door, and I’m going to sip rye whiskey while I watch you rot.”
“How quaint, how country,” David mocks him. “I’d be scared to death if I didn’t know all about Sergeant Jack Jericho, the sniveling coward. You can make all the threats you want, Sergeant. Problem is, it takes balls to go ballistic!”
“Let’s go at it, just you and me,” Jericho shoots back. “Or are you afraid without your zonked-out warriors?”
“You dare call me, ‘afraid?’ You, whose life is circumscribed by fear. Like the Sioux warrior who is hung from a line of rawhide strung through his back, I fear no pain. I fear no man. And most of all, I fear not you, Jack Jericho.”
David cackles spitefully and hangs up. Jericho angrily bangs his fist against the wall of the tube, and even the metallic echo sounds like a scornful laugh.
Ten minutes later, Jericho is at the screen separating the exhaust tube from the interior of the missile silo. He peers through it, sees two commandos on the floor of the silo ninety feet below. Carefully, Jericho removes the screen, then swings out of the tube onto the orange steel ladder that is bolted into the silo wall. He slides down the ladder several feet to the gantry and flattens himself against its floor. He is staring directly at the fourth stage of the missile, just below the nose cone, and something is wrong.
A hole.
Like a cavity in a tooth.
The computer box is missing.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” he says to himself. He remembers the palm-sized Newton Messagepad Fax he lifted from the security officers’ barracks and pulls it out of the rucksack. Hitting the power, he uses the electronic stylus to draw a picture, then punches out a number and hits the SEND button.
Colonel Henry Zwick stands in front of the command tent, admiring the spruce and fir trees silhouetted by a half-moon. It is just after nine p.m. His men and machines are primed, and it’s quiet at Base Camp Alpha. As he puffs on his pipe, the only sound is of the wind through the trees, the chirping of night birds, and the belly-aching of Captain Kyle Clancy, who has been pleading his case for the Night Stalkers.
“My men are ready, colonel. Damn, this is a cakewalk, if you’d just let us go.”
“It’s not up to me, Kyle. You know that.”
“This can’t be any harder than breaking a hostage out of Cárcel Modelo prison in Panama or getting back Napoleón Duarte’s daughter in El Salvador.”
“Be patient, Kyle. You know, the best Viet Cong snipers could sit in a tree for two weeks without moving just to get a good shot at an American officer.”
“Before my time. All I know is, my men got real hard-ons for some action.”
“Tell ‘em to keep it in their pants for now, Kyle.”
An aide emerges from the tent and hands Colonel Zwick a sheet of paper. The colonel examines Jericho’s FAX, a crude drawing of the missile with an opening in the nose cone. Scowling, the colonel says to the aide, “Get me General Corrigan.” Then he turns back to Captain Clancy. “Kyle, your men may get to unzip after all.”
The colonel turns to head back into the command tent. He takes one last puff on his pipe and disappears inside. In his wake, wisps of cherry-flavored smoke curl into the breeze and disappear into the night air.
Lying prone on the floor of the gantry, Jericho peers down at the silo floor. White steam hisses from the idling launch generators, and in the reflection of the red silo lights, billows up like blood-stained fog.
Two commandos patrol the floor of the silo. One opens the grate to the drainage sump while the other holds a flashlight and looks inside. “It’s wet down there, Jacob,” says the one with the flashlight.