-54-
Die a Hero
Jack Jericho is drenched.
And exhausted.
And bloodied from bouncing off rocks and trees on the way down what used to be — and once again is — Chugwater River.
Rappelling down the silo wall, the adrenaline ebbs, and he feels his arms give out. He hangs there a moment, then kicks off the wall, letting yards of rope escape. Without gloves and a harness, the rope burns a trail around his waist and tears skin from the palms of his hands. He swings lower, strikes the wall with his boots and kicks off again, teetering into space.
Clang, he bangs into the missile, rebounds like a pinball back into the silo wall and off again. This time he desperately reaches out and grabs the nose cone. Hugging the missile. Struggling to hang onto the top of the titanium shroud with one hand, he uses the other to dip into his tool belt where he comes out with one of the wrenches. Too big. He tries the second wrench, adjusts it, and goes to work.
A moment later, in the launch control capsule, David is looking at a monitor showing water pouring into the silo. He hits a button, and a different camera shows the missile. The shot pans from the floor of the silo, where the water is now three feet deep, up to the burners, suspended another seven feet higher. The camera moves higher, showing the shaft of the missile to the fourth stage where David sees a sight that freezes him.
Dangling on a rope, a man has a wrench attached to the nose cone computer box.
The sergeant!
The maintenance man.
Like the beggar Lazarus, rising from the dead.
“I knew he’d come back,” Susan Burns says from her position at the back wall.
“You knew nothing!” David yells.
“He wanted to change. You gave him the chance.”
“I gave him the chance to die. Now I will have to help him.” David grabs a headset and an Uzi and turns to Rachel. “Launch the instant you have the second key.”
“But what if you are in the silo?”
“Launch!”
Watching him go, Rachel has tears in her eyes.
In black watch caps and darkened faces, the Green Berets and Rangers are slipping into their harnesses, which fit uneasily over their Kevlar armored vests. Each man is responsible for his own rope, assault rifle, gas mask and saw-toothed knife. They are thirsting for the chance to go down that hole.
It’s what they’ve trained for. To save their country. And the world.
The Rangers are famed as assault troops. The product of intense, dangerous training, they are among the world’s best fighting men and truly believe the mystique that goes with the Ranger creed: “I accept the fact that as a Ranger my country expects me to move further, faster and fight harder than any other soldier. Never shall I fail my comrades.”
The Green Berets trace their history to the early 1950’s when eight-man “A-Teams” were trained to fight the Russians behind enemy lines in the event of World War III. Today, they undergo grueling training and are experts in raids, reconnaissance, ambushes and sabotage.
The lieutenant knows it’s a death trap. Bodies will be stacked like cord wood at the bottom of the shaft. They’ll be the only cover for the men who come after them. He hears Colonel Zwick’s raspy voice through the headphones. “Son, you gotta get your men down that shaft. Jackal’s stuck on top the mountain.”
“I could divert half my men to the silo,” the lieutenant says. “Divide the enemy force in the hole.”
“Too late. That’s low ground, under water now, and not passable. Not even the SEALs could get down there.”
Jack Jericho is not a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger or Green Beret. At this moment, he could be a window washer on a high-rise skyscraper. Except his rope is looped through a clip on his tool belt and wrapped twice around his waist — wrapped so tightly he thinks a boa constrictor has chosen him for a mate — and a waterfall pours over him from above. But he’s not washing windows. He’s performing a lobotomy on a nuclear missile.
Jericho has two of the recessed bolts out of the computer box. It is not easy work. The wrench does not fit perfectly and keeps slipping off. His hands are wet, and his arms are dead. He tugs hard on the third bolt. Tighter than the first two. He places both hands at the end of the wrench handle for additional purchase and puts all his weight behind it. The wrench slips, Jericho loses his balance and dangles precariously over the silo floor. He reaches up, steadies himself on the rope, then swings back to the nose cone.
He’s back at work on the third bolt when he thinks he hears a familiar sound. He stops and listens. The roar of rushing water. His own breathing. Nothing more.
But there it is again, an electrical hum that grows louder, and Jericho watches as the gantry’s work cage heads up the silo wall. He can’t see through the roof of the gantry, and Jack Jericho has never been blessed with even modest extrasensory powers. But he knows who’s there, knows it in his heart, feels it in his bones. Brother David has come to kill him.
Jericho regains his balance, gets a decent grip on the wrench, and urgently works at the third bolt. The wrench catches and the bolt comes free, Jericho dropping it into the water far below. The gantry has not even come to a stop when David fires a burst of 9 mm. shells from the Uzi. He aims for Jericho’s back, the widest target, but the movement of the gantry throws him off. The Uzi shoots high, and the shells plunk into the concrete wall of the far side of the silo.
Jericho spins in his rope, a fly caught in a spider’s dangling web. Pushing off the nose cone, he spins to the other side, using the missile itself for cover.
Another burst from the Uzi, several shots pinging off the titanium shroud of the nose cone. Jericho winces as sparks fly.
The gunshots stop.
Stalemate.
David can’t shoot him, and Jericho can’t reach the computer box.
David yells over the roar of the waterfall. “You’re finally going to get your wish, maintenance man.”
Jericho stays hidden behind the nose cone, but David sprays a half-dozen shots over him anyway. “You’re going to die a hero,” David says.
-55-
Nailing It
Water pours through the grates in the floor of the silo. Not enough to keep the water level from rising under the missile, but enough to flood the sump. At an incline in the sump near the launch control capsule, the water is just below James’ waist and still rising.
James takes a deep breath and dives under the surface, holding a flashlight. Cheeks blown out like a tropical fish, he sweeps the floor with his hand, desperately reaching for the key.
Hitting it.
Knocking it farther away. Damn. Damn. Damn.
He comes up for air. Gasping. He’s in lousy shape, a condition he blames on the lack of protein in the Eden Ranch diet. Funny, thinking about food at a time like this. But that’s what is going through his mind. Things he’ll miss when he’s dead. Which won’t be long, he is sure. Steaks and crossword puzzles and jazz quartets, and the computers, of course. But not much more. James always knew what it would be like, joining Davy on this gig. The final riff. A long way from taking yokels’ money for ten minutes of mind reading.
More than any of David’s followers, James knew. Not that he considered himself a follower. Buddies, pals, best friends. Okay, so Davy was the leader, as between the two of them, but James was no born-again groupie. Since the time they were kids, he knew Davy had a gift, could see things, and that was cool. It was long ago that James attached himself to Davy like a pilot fish to a shark, and it paid off for both of them. James had no life, he’d be the first to admit. Never did. No other friends as a kid, unsure with girls, then hopeless with women.