"Take her down lower, pilot," Melvis said, jerking the pilot's right earlobe like a sash cord.
The chopper pilot sent the helicopter angling down.
That caught the attention of the soldiers. As if hooked up to the same nervous system, they turned in unison, and pointed their weapons at them.
"Dang if they don't look like they're hijackin' that train!"
The tiny figures lit up their tiny weapons. Tiny flashes of stuttering light showed here and there.
The arriving rounds were tiny, too. But they stung.
"Up! Pull her up," Melvis howled as the Plexiglas bubble began to spiderweb and frost up before their eyes.
Chapter 17
Before the helicopter dropped out of the Nebraska sky, Major Claiborne Grimm figured it couldn't get any worse.
He was wrong. And it was already as bad as he could imagine it ever getting.
Short of all-out thermonuclear exchange, that is.
The desert camouflage Peacekeeper train had been rolling on high iron en route to the Strategic Air Command airbase in Omaha, making good time. It was a routine train movement. Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California, to Omaha. A month later it would retrace the trip.
No one would know it wasn't an ordinary freight consist of the Union Pacific line. It looked ordinary. The production-model SD40-2 diesel engine was right off the line. The modifications enabling her to operate in wartime were indistinguishable even to the most ardent rail fan. Her armor, bulletproof glass, silvery flash curtains and hidden surveillance cameras wouldn't show up if the unit were photographed at a dead stop with a telephoto lens and made into a Rail Fan magazine gatefold.
The desert camo livery was getting old, but the beauty of it was that it was functional.
Back in the early days of the MX missile program, the brass would never have dreamed of slapping military-style camouflage coloration on a Peacekeeper train. The whole idea was to disperse the nation's MX arsenal along its rail system, staying mobile so the Russkie spy satellites couldn't pinpoint them. If they couldn't pinpoint them, they couldn't target the U.S. nuclear force for a surprise first strike.
It was a gigantic shell game, and it had cost the American taxpayers untold billions of dollars in research-and-development costs until Congress slashed defense funding and the Air Force voluntarily abandoned the MX program.
Congress thought that was the end of it. The American public thought that was the end of it. But it was not the end of it.
The Air Force had possession of the only multibillion-dollar train consist in human history and it wasn't about to mothball it. Not in the uncertain post-Cold War world, where the once-mighty Soviets had reverted to being the plain old Russkies-and who knew which way they would jump?
So Major Claiborne Grimm found himself riding the rails every month or so in the launch-control car overseeing train operations.
It was a routine run until he got the nervous call from the first car in line, the security-command car.
"Major. Airman Frisch here."
"Go ahead, Airman."
"Engineer reports we have a man on the track."
"Jesus."
"He wants to know if we should brake."
"Of course he should brake. Tell him to brake."
"But, Major, security-"
"Brake the damn train. If we run a civilian over, we'll have local authorities crawling all over our HyCubes. All we need is for it to get out that we're running an unauthorized nuclear program and all our asses will be decommissioned."
"Yes, Sir."
The sudden screaming of the air brakes warned Grimm to grab for something solid. Still, he was thrown off his feet when the train began decelerating.
His eyes went to the launch-control officers sitting at their dual consoles, one at end each of the launch-control car.
They signaled they were okay. Grimm wished he could say the same. His heart was up in his throat, and his stomach was butterflying something fierce.
"Man, just please don't have hit anyone," Grimm moaned.
With a clashing of tight-box couplers, the consist finally knocked to a dead stop.
Only then did Grimm lever himself off the stainless-steel floor and hit the intercar intercom.
"Engineer, say status!"
The engineer's voice was tight and strangled.
"Too late," he said. "He went under my engine."
"Damn civilians," he said, not sure which man he was thinking of-the careless fool under the trucks or the engineer, who was himself a civilian sworn to secrecy.
Grimm hit the button connecting him to the security car. "Security team. Detrain. On the double."
Turning to his second-in-command, Grimm said, "I'm turning operational control over to you. Do not under any circumstances open this car to anyone except myself. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Sir."
"And the password of the day shall be-'Hotbox.'"
"Hotbox. Yes, Sir."
"If this is a hijacking and I give 'Redball' as the password, you have my permission to take off with all due speed leaving me defiled. Do you understand?"
"No, Sir. What is defiled?"
"To be defiled," Major Grimm said, unlocking and sliding open the single escape door, "means to be left in the dust."
Stepping down, Major Grimm saw that the security team was all over the consist.
Running over to the security officer, he said, "Report."
"We hit a man on the tracks. We're looking for him now."
"Man on foot?"
"Yes, Sir."
Grimm looked to the train. His eyes automatically went to the second boxcar, where the MX Peacekeeper missile crouched like a cougar awaiting the launch command. For as long as he had been in charge of ferrying the beast through cornfields and prairie, he wondered if he was carrying a live one. His superior officers refused to confirm or deny that the aluminum-tipped titanium warhead packed live Mark 21 reentry vehicles or inert dummies. The possibility that they might be dummies offered absolutely no comfort at all.
His empty side-arm holster slapping his thigh, Grimm joined the search.
"Any sign?" he asked, bending down to join an airman peering past the unique eight-wheel trucks, cocked .45 in hand.
"No, sir."
Grimm could see plainly that no body or any detached parts thereof lay under the consist.
Getting up, he walked the length of the train.
At each checkpoint he received "No, sir" and puzzled faces.
Someone handed Grimm a pair of field glasses, and he trained them down the length of track. It ran straight as a ruler, and if there was a body mashed into the ties, it was bound to show.
But it didn't. Grimm climbed to the roof of the last car.
Kneeling, he scanned the line. No body. No splash of red to show that a civilian had been struck. The surrounding prairie was likewise clean.
Clambering back down, Grimm said, "Anybody see anything? Anything at all?"
"Just the engine," the security officer reported.
"I think we should talk to the engineer," Grimm said, loping back to the engine. "Have your men stand ready."
"Yes, sir."
THE ENGINEER REFUSED to open his cab until Grimm gave him the password of the day.
"Hotbox."
"Wasn't that yesterday's password?"
"Yesterday's was 'Reefer.'"
"That's right, it was." The door banged open. "C'mon in."
Grimm climbed the ladder. He shut it behind him. "We can't find a body," he said tightly.
"We ran right over the poor dumb SOB."
"What'd he look like?"
"Dressed all in black, like one of them whatchamacallits." The engineer was snapping his fingers as if that would help his memory.
Grimm pitched in. "Bikers?"
"No."
"Protesters?"
"No. No. One of those Jap skulkers."
"Ninja?"
"Yeah! That's it. He was dressed like a dirty lowdown, egg-sucking ninja. Face all muffled sneaky-like and everything."