Higher up the mountain, the four commandos dig deep into their hiding places, burying their heads, bullets ricocheting around them.
In the drainage ditch, Captain Clancy looks at his stopwatch. Four minutes. Kenosha said he could get up there in four minutes. “That old bastard better be in place,” he says to himself, “because we can’t help him now.” He raises his right hand in front of his forehead, palm to the front and swings his hand up and down several times in front of his face. Though it looks like a drunken salute, it is the cease fire signal, and the men obey. In a moment, there is no sound coming from the ditch. “Now!” Clancy orders.
A soldier with an M203 launcher pulls the trigger, and a grenade sails high over the commandos’ position. “Eyes closed! Everybody!” Clancy yells.
Flash-bang! The burst of a million candlepower isotropic grenade ignites the sky.
Then, from the top of the mountain comes a blood-curdling war whoop.
The soldiers hold their fire. Kenosha is behind the commandos. Any gunfire from below would be as likely to hit him as the enemy. He is on his own.
Kenosha rides down the ditch, the blazing light behind him. He attacks the exposed commandos from the rear. They turn and look up, blinded by the bright flash, their eyes spotted with thousands of pinpricks in dazzling colors. What they see reflected off their corneas freezes them.
Indians on horseback!
Screaming at the night in a language they have never heard.
An avalanche of attacking warriors waving long-barreled pistols in the electrified air.
Kenosha holds the palomino’s reins with one hand and aims the heavy revolver with the other. Shooting a target from a moving horse is akin to surfing and playing the violin at the same time. But Kenosha takes down the first commando where he stands. The second tries to hide between two boulders, squeezing into a crevice, but gets stuck. Unable to move, he aims his rifle in the general vicinity of the moon, and Kenosha drops him with two shots to the chest. The third commando flattens to a prone position and gets off a quick burst that sails over the Indian’s head. Kenosha pulls the palomino into a zig-zag gallop, misses with the first shot, then gut shoots the commando with the next. The fourth commando runs from behind the rocks, scurrying over a boulder, trying to get the hell out of Dodge.
Cr-ack. Captain Clancy drops him with a hundred-fifty yard scoped shot to the head.
“Damn good shooting!” he yells up the slope to Kenosha. “We make a damn fine team.”
Jack Jericho climbs over the railing of the observation deck that juts out from the dam control building and overlooks the missile facility far below. He crosses the deck and peers through a window where illuminated gauges and meters glow in the darkened control room. The controls are run by computer and monitored twenty-four hours a day at the central water district headquarters outside Laramie. The building itself is deserted. Jericho tries a door leading from the deck to the control room.
Locked.
He knows he has very little time. A few moments ago, the sky lit up like the Fourth of July. Now, the gunfire from the backside of the mountain has stopped, but he figures it was just a prelude.
A table and three redwood chairs sit on the observation deck. Jericho picks up one of the chairs. Heavier than it looks. He struggles with it and approaches the window.
Kenosha and Captain Clancy ride side-by-side on horseback, approaching the dam control building from the back side of the mountain. The rest of Clancy’s men follow. They are chattering happily, adrenaline pumping. They’ve had a taste of battle. Now they want the main course.
They pull up behind the control building and Clancy speak into his radio. “Jackal reporting. Objective one achieved, sir. Delta team… ” He winks at Kenosha, “plus one tough Indian, ready for kickoff.”
Colonel Zwick says something, but Clancy can’t hear it over a discordant crash, the sound of glass breaking.
“Now what the hell was that?” Clancy says.
It is 4:35 a.m. when Jericho steps through the broken window into the control room. He navigates in the dark through a maze of overhead piping, meters, valves and gauges, listening to the steady hum of machinery. A window on the far side of the room looks out over the dam itself. Sodium-vapor lights illuminate the water far below, an artificial lake created by closing off Chugwater River and diverting it to a trickle that runs down the front of the mountain through the aqueduct.
Jericho finds a switch and flicks on a set of overhead lights. He wanders around, examining the massive control panels, not knowing exactly what he’s looking for, and not knowing if his plan will work. He’s good with machinery, but the names on the panels speak a foreign language: Riprap Sensors; Filtration Governor; Spillway Intake. Then, Sluice Gate.
Which had to be the one. A chrome wheel four feet in diameter is attached to the Sluice Gate panel. Jericho tries to turn it counter-clockwise, opening the gate, but it doesn’t budge. He tries to turn it clockwise. Still, nothing. He braces both feet against a floor panel and gives it everything he’s got, but nothing moves except a disk in his lumbar spine that threatens to explode.
Okay, the wheel is locked.
Which makes sense.
You don’t want some boozed-up technician stumbling into the controls and opening the flood gates.
He looks at the panel and finds rows of numbered green and red lights and switches. Somewhere, there’s a release for the Sluice Gate valve. How much harm can he do, he wonders, by hitting a few switches. Probably less than he’s going to by finding the right switch. Just as he’s about to find out, he there comes a sharp and angry voice: “Infidel!”
Jericho whirls around. He barely notices the shotgun pointed at his chest. Instead he is drawn to the face of the ugliest man he has ever seen. The man’s skin is a mass of raw, festering blisters. Blood mixes with pus on open sores. “Do you know who I am?” The voice slurs from a mouth hidden under swollen, purple lips.
“Your voice is familiar, and you sort of look like Elvis if they just dug him up.”
Ker-click. The man pumps the shotgun. Jericho’s Uzi is slung across a shoulder. It might as well be at Fort Bragg.
“They call me Matthew.”
“Oh,” Jericho says, remembering their encounter in the kitchen. “You’re the guy who can’t stay away from the french fries.”
Matthew’s lips twist like fat worms into a grotesque smile. “I want to see your pain when I shoot you. I want you to die slowly.”
“You don’t have to shoot,” Jericho says, not giving in to the fear. “Just looking at your face ought to do it.”
“I’ll cut your legs off at the knees!” Matthew drops the barrel low, aiming for Jericho’s lower legs.
Jericho leaps up, grabs an overhead pipe and swings his legs as high as he can. The blast caroms off the floor beneath him, and he can feel ricocheting pellets stinging his rump. Matthew pumps again, and Jericho dives from the pipe, shoulder rolls under a counter and out the other side. A second blast shatters a row of gauges and monitors.
Jericho scurries on all fours along the floor. Ka-boom. A third shot pelts him with shards of shattered glass from the light fixtures. Once behind a table, Jericho comes up and fires a short burst from the Uzi, inflicting serious wounds on a bank of computer consoles but nothing else. Though he can’t see Matthew, he hears the shotgun pump, and the next blast blows up an electrical panel, which sizzles with orange sparks. Jericho fires a burst at the opposite wall, then scrambles around the eight-foot high control panel, peers out, and spots Matthew turned the other way. Jericho pulls the trigger, and click.