The second explosion rocks the underground cavern and sets loose a choking cloud of dust. The powerful Semtex jars the blast door, and a burly N.C.O. pries it open with a crowbar. The lieutenant leads six Green Berets into the launch control capsule. The first two inside roughly yank James and Rachel from their flight chairs.
“It’s too late!” Susan Burns cries out. “The launch is activated. When the gases reach full pressure, the missile will go.”
“How do we abort?” the lieutenant demands.
James looks up from his position on the floor. “You don’t. Once the key is turned, it’s too late.” James gives him a sickly smile and sings out, “Sor-ry.”
The lieutenant kicks him in the ribs with a hard-toed combat boot. The computer’s voice says, “Launch in sixty seconds.”
The lieutenant looks up at a security monitor. A camera halfway up the silo wall is panning from the floor where the gases beat the gushing water into a seething foam. The camera pivots skyward, up the length of the missile. There at the top, a man is tangled in a rope. He seems to struggle, and at first the lieutenant thinks the man is trying to get free so he can leap from the nose cone to the gantry. But then it becomes clear.
The man is tying the rope tighter. He wraps it around his legs and loops it over the nose of the missile, pulling it taut, then knotting it.
“Who the fuck is that?” the lieutenant asks.
With tears in her eyes, Rachel answers, “The Messiah.”
“Yeah? Well, he looks like hood ornament to me.”
A torrent of water that began its journey in Chugwater Dam, then spilled down the mountain and cascaded into the silo, now surges through the drainage sump. Compressed into the channel, it picks up speed, tearing at ductwork, breaking Jericho out of the web of piping, and carrying him farther away from the silo. There is nowhere to go but where the water will take him. The channel reaches an incline where the water slows and becomes more shallow. Out of breath and barely conscious, Jericho reaches up, grabs an overhanging pipe and pulls his head above the water.
He drinks in a series of short breaths and hangs there, gasping.
And thinking.
He can let the slowing water carry him farther into the sump, away from the silo. Which is what he should do. Get out of harm’s way before the missile blows.
He tried to stop it. There’s nothing more he can do.
He thought he was going to die, but now he knows, he can survive this. No one could blame him for running now.
No one.
Except himself. He’s run before. He was frightened then. Afraid to die. If heroism is acting courageously in the face of fear, what he is about to do isn’t heroic at all. He is a man without fear, something he has not been for a long time. Unafraid to die, he is nonetheless a man with a purpose for living. And that, too, is something he has not been for a long time.
Jericho turns back toward the silo, fighting the current, which tears at him and tumbles him backward into the water. He gets up and struggles on, desperately pulling ahead on pipes and conduits. The water deepens as he gets closer to the silo, filling the channel, and his head bangs against the ceiling. He has no choice but to go under. He takes a breath and exhales, sucks in another breath, and dives under, kicking hard, swimming against the current, pulling himself along on scaffolding and floor-mounted equipment. He blows out some dead air, feels the ache in his lungs, kicks harder, and keeps going. He swims up through the open drain and into the silo where he bobs to the surface and takes in a long breath.
The water is twenty feet deep now, extending ten feet up the suspended missile, which bobs in its cables. The steaming gases continue to fill the canister. The propulsion launch can only be seconds away, he knows. He kicks out of a swirling whirlpool, swims alongside the missile, reaches up and grabs the umbilical cord that hangs from the fourth stage. He pulls on the umbilical and steadies himself, then hangs there, half in the water, half out. Does he even have time to climb up the cord to get to the computer box? If he makes it, how will he get the box open?
He sees David above him, lashed to the nose cone. Jericho looks at his own hands. He holds the umbilical, the spinal cord of the missile, where even now, final digital instructions are being fed to the MGCS from the launch control capsule’s computer. On the gantry, he couldn’t reach it. On the floor of the silo, same thing. But now, lifted by the water, here it is. If only there is enough time.
Jericho grabs the saw-toothed survival knife from the sheath on his leg and begins frantically cutting through the thick rubber casing to a mass of colorful wires underneath.
In the STRATCOM War Room, no one speaks as the computerized voice calmly announces, “Propulsion steady. Pressure three hundred pounds per square inch. Launch in fifteen seconds. Systems go. Confidence is high. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven… ”
Jericho saws away at the umbilical, cutting deeper through the web of wires, down to the last, thin filaments, which he severs just as…
Whoosh! The rocket erupts skyward, bursting from the water and out of the silo with incredible speed.
The roiling water propels Jericho to the bottom, sweeps him into the vortex of an underwater maelstrom. He smashes against the silo floor, spins a dizzying circle under water and is driven to the surface, then hard into the steel ladder on the silo wall, where he desperately clings to a rung as the water surges over him.
From the perimeter of Base Camp Alpha, Colonel Henry Zwick watches through binoculars, and what a sight. Against the first light of dawn, the sleek black missile soars above the waterfall pouring into the silo. “Mother of mercy,” he whispers to himself.
Trailed by a blast of steam, the missile seems to hang in the air for a moment.
Motionless, as if deciding on its own, whether to fly or…
The missile pitches over and drops back to earth, splashing down into the river that once again flows through the missile base and onward into the valley. The missile picks up speed in the current, bouncing down a series of rapids in the shallow water, now tinted red by the rising sun.
The Big Board shows a computer simulation of the PK lifting off, and then, the impotent missile simply drops back to earth. A technician in a headset stands at his console, “No first stage ignition! No flame! The bird is down! The bird is down!”
A second of quiet relief. Then jubilation. The officers slap each other on the back as if their genius resulted in the triumph. General Corrigan walks around, thanking his staff. Nervous laughter. Locker room congratulations. “We had’em all the way.” The celebration is still going when the technician sits back down at his console. Watching the monitor, he hits a few keys. His brow is furrowed. “General,” he calls out. “You’d better have a look at this.”
Dazed and bleeding, Jack Jericho climbs the steel ladder toward the lip of the silo. He can see the contrails in the sky above him, but he knows it is merely a steam trail. He would have heard the rockets explode to life if there had been ignition. He would have seen the burst of orange flame from the first stage of the rocket, would have been scorched by its heat.
He knows the missile is down, and reason tells him, it is dead. The warheads would not have armed until the missile was on its ballistic descent. Reason tells him that David is dead, too. But a feeling of utter dread tells him something else. Other than the nightmares that peered into his own past, Jack Jericho never had a vision. Now, he does not so much see as feel. He feels the malefic presence of David Morton and can nearly sense his derisive laughter. A wave of fear sweeps over Jericho. For he knows, without knowing how, that David is alive.