Ballistic Page 16

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Oh, but you won’t.”

  Susan fights to stay calm, wanting to draw him out, make him continue talking. She needs to probe his personality, find his weaknesses and attack them. At the same time, she knows that David is using his own psychological warfare against her, alternating doses of charm and terror. His flaw, she believes, is his ego, his overwhelming belief that his charisma will draw people to him, make them do his bidding. This leads her to a startling conclusion. David believes he can convert her, make her one of his followers and even more, make her worship him.

  Susan Burns is well aware of the Stockholm syndrome, the intense relationship whereby a hostage forms an artificial emotional attachment to a terrorist, a dependence born of the lust for survival. He has traumatized her and weakened her. She is tired, alone and frightened. But she vows to fight.

  “Tell me about your therapy,” she says.

  “Are you familiar with the Mach test, doctor?”

  “It’s named for Machiavelli and tests a person’s willingness to manipulate, to dehumanize, to treat others as objects. At the high end, there is total lack of concern with conventional morality. Lying, cheating and deceit are considered the norm.”

  “And how do you think I scored?”

  “A twenty.”

  “No, twenty-one.”

  “That’s impossible. Twenty is the highest, or lowest, depending how you look at it.”

  “I got a bonus,” he says, proudly, “for killing the psychiatrist’s hamsters.”

  “You’re trying to shock me,” she says. “Why not just tell me about it?”

  “The shrink was one of your sixties peaceniks who still drove a VW bus and listened to Joan Baez. Had a kitchenette in his office, used to make godawful fruit and veggie drinks. One day, I dropped the little fellow – the hamster, not the shrink – into the blender. Put some lumps in his smoothie.”

  Still fighting the pain in her arms, Susan struggles not to show her revulsion.

  David smiles to himself and unfastens another button of her blouse. “So, doctor, any more thoughts on little Davy? And don’t sugar coat it. If you lie to me, I’ll cause you pain.”

  She takes a breath and says, “Primary narcissism with delusional episodes and bouts of sadistic sexual paraphilia.”

  “Mmm. You’re getting warmer. And so am I.” Suddenly, he rips the blouse open, popping the remaining buttons. Susan gasps with fear, then strains for control, even as her breasts heave under her bra.

  David watches her intently, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “My mother wore white brassieres with little pink bows, just like you. Now there’s grist for your mill, eh doctor?”

  Susan is silent, afraid to venture more opinions. It is a struggle for control, she knows. She must wrest it away without enraging him.

  “Come now, doctor,” he says. Playful now. “Don’t you want to know how a boy like me got to be a boy like me? Wouldn’t you like to venture an expert medical opinion?”

  “I would suspect that you had a successful, distant, authoritarian father and a frivolous, indulgent, highly seductive mother. Your parents were self-centered, and rather than being affectionate, merely indulged you. Instead of experiencing feelings, you became charming and manipulative and simply pretended to feel for others in order to obtain what you wished. It is possible that your parents, particularly your father, had criminal impulses which he never acted on, but which he unconsciously projected onto you, hoping you would actualize them, giving him the vicarious pleasure without the risk. In short, your nuclear family was sick, and they made you sick.”

  “Nuclear family,” he muses. “An apt phrase, given our circumstances, don’t you think? Still, you can do better than that. Be more specific. Your generalities may apply to bottom-feeding serial killers like Bundy and Dahmer, but I consider myself rather special.”

  Susan feels the muscles in her calves beginning to cramp and her arms are growing numb. “From an early age, you engaged in fetishistic masturbatory fantasies. You daydreamed about killing, probably on a massive scale. You—

  “You’re getting off the track. My family, doctor. Tell me about my family, and do entertain me. If you’re boring, I shall have to entertain myself, and you wouldn’t like that, I assure you.”

  “As I said, your father was likely powerful and remote. He either pushed you—”

  “Ah, more clichés.”

  “Or ignored you. The cliché would be that he never played ball with you.”

  “He played chess with me, taught me the game when I was four, my beloved father did. If I made a move he considered inferior…”

  Wham. David slams his open palm into the overhead pipe. Startled, Susan instinctively raises her legs. The movement causes her to swing to and fro on the pipe. Her arms throb.

  “He’d box my ears,” David says.

  Her voice quaking, a hot pain searing her shoulders, she says softly, “Your father didn’t know how to express—”

  “Shut up! It’s my forty-five minutes, doctor. One day, when I was eight, we were playing chess, just like always. I tried a new maneuver, something he hadn’t seen before, and it appeared that my queen was vulnerable…” Wham. David hits the pipe again, and Susan winces. “He hits me, screams at me for being stupid, but I don’t cry. I just keep playing. Five moves later, checkmate. I win!”

  “And he never hit you again.”

  “Wrong! He hit me harder. He just never played with me again.”

  Susan senses the opportunity and goes for it. “Don’t you see? Surely, you do. You have the intelligence. You know precisely what shaped you. Armed with that knowledge, you can change. You can—”

  “Doctor, doctor. What is the primary reason why therapy is almost always useless for true psychopaths?”

  She considers lying, figures he would know, then simply speaks the truth. “Motivation. They don’t want to change. They enjoy their aberrational behavior.

  “Quite so,” he says, as he unhooks her bra, and lets it fall to the floor.

  * * *

  The unmarked C-21A, a Lear jet in the military configuration, descends from twenty thousand feet over the flat Nebraska countryside. Professor Lionel Morton sits with his head pressed against the window, staring at the horizon. Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Griggs has silently studied the professor for the past ninety minutes. He knows that Lionel Morton was the boy genius of the missile program in the fifties and sixties. Now, he is considered an oddball, a dinosaur. Brilliant and combative, he’s been fired and rehired by the Air Force a dozen times.

  “Without the S.L.C., they can’t launch the missile, can they?” Griggs asks. He has a well-trimmed mustache and his pale hair has gone gray at the temples.

  “Correct. The professor still stares out the window.

  “So there’s no problem, is there? Special Forces can take back the silo in what, fifteen or twenty minutes. Hell, they would have done it already if we didn’t have the bad luck to have half-a-dozen foreign ambassadors down the hole.”

  “Bad luck or clever planning?”

  That makes the colonel think. “You mean the bastards knew about the U.N. delegation?”

  “It was in the newspapers,” the professor says, dismissing the notion of luck, good or bad. “It is consistent with a well-planned operation.”

  “Not so well-planned that they had the slick.”

  The jet begins its descent though a thin layer of clouds over Offutt Air Force Base just outside Omaha. Professor Morton turns to face the lieutenant colonel. “But they seemed to have everything else, didn’t they? What makes you think they can’t get the secondary code?”

  “Well, how will they get it? The President’s not going to give it to them. You don’t mean to say they have access to it down in the hole.”

  Professor Morton closes his eyes and listens to the sound of the landing gear lower into place. “I mean we’re going to find out just how clever they are.”

 
; “Damn.” Griggs uses the knuckle of an index finger to scratch at his mustache. “Then we’d getter get ready to shoot down the missile.”

  “With what?” The professor seems oddly pleased by the suggestion even as he rejects it. “Tomahawks, Cruise, Sparrows? Lousy range, and none of them can do more than Mach 4. That bird flies at Mach 20, more than fifteen thousand miles an hour at burnout when it goes ballistic.”

  “We don’t wait ‘til it hits apogee, professor. We surround the silo with batteries of Patriots, kill the bird on liftoff.”

  “You think my missile is some rustbucket Scud from Baghdad?” He lets out a little laugh. The weapon’s superiority is a source of pride and amusement. He lets his voice slip into its lecture mode. “The Air Force is just dandy at launching missiles, not at shooting them down. On liftoff you’d have no time to acquire the target. You’d either fire too soon or too late, or at the right time at the wrong angle. You might as well try shooting a lightning bolt with a pistol.”

  This quiets Griggs, and as the Lear’s wheels touch down with a screech of rubber on pavement, he clicks open his seatbelt, as if that will hurry them on the way to STRATCOM. He stands before the small jet comes to a stop on the tarmac where a helicopter is waiting. Two Airborne Rangers help the professor off the plane and into a waiting military van. There is no time to lose.

  * * *

  Susan hangs painfully from the overhead pipe, her breasts exposed. Brother David stands in front of her, his head cocked as if listening to a distant voice. His eyes are unfocused.

  “Father and I always competed for mother’s attention,” he says softly.

  A tear tracks slowly down Susan’s cheek.

  “Quite a wit, my father. Nicknamed me Oedipus.” He waits for a response, doesn’t get one, and continues. “Just for the record, doctor, I didn’t really have an affair with my mother, then kill my father. But not for lack of trying.”

  David rests his head between Susan’s breasts, and her shoulders tremble. “Did you know I had an appointment to West Point? Daddy arranged it. He was chummy with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and just about everyone at the Pentagon whose name started with ‘General.’ Loved the military, though he never served, of course. What hopes he had for me.”

  “Do you feel you failed him?” Susan asks, the numbness paralyzing her.

  David nuzzles her breasts with his chin. “I’m sure he would think so. But he could hardly be the one to cast stones.” He takes a nipple in his mouth, and sucks at it.

  “What does that mean?” Susan asks, squeezing her eyes shut.

  David releases her nipple and seems to appraise it. “I came home after plebe year at the Point and found my mother with three broken ribs.” David reaches behind her and unzips her skirt and pulls it down over her hips. “And a black eye she pathetically tried to cover with makeup.”

  David drops to the floor on his knees, lifts up her feet, one at a time, gathers up the skirt and tosses it aside. Still on his knees, he presses his cheek into her abdomen and continues to talk. “He’d beaten her before, of course. For as long as I can remember. Accused her of adultery, of burning the lamb chops, of spending too much money. Such an angry man. And she always made excuses for him. As if it were her fault. But it wasn’t.”

  David’s arms are wrapped around her, squeezing her buttocks. “I always thought I should have done something when I was younger. I could have stopped him, but I didn’t.”

  “But this time you did,” she says.

  “I found my father’s gun. Bang! Bang! Then I found religion.”

  Susan begins to sob. David stands and studies her.

  “Your nipples are erect, Dr. Burns. But alas, I am not.”

  He turns and walks from the room, leaving her suspended from the pipe, half naked and in tears. Without looking back, he says, “Pray tell, what would Freud say?”

  -32-

  Coward!

  Jack Jericho splashes through the drainage sump, stopping to look up through the grates above his head. He knows he is directly under the tunnel leading from the launch control capsule to the silo, knows too that no one should be in the tunnel, but is not surprised to see the outline of two men through the shadowy grate.

  “Are you ready, Ezekiel?” a voice asks.

  “Always, Brother David. But will you open the seven seals?”

  “In due time.”

  “The men believe in you, Brother David.”

  “Let them believe in the Word. It will lead them.”

  Weirdos of God, Jericho thinks. He moves directly under the grate, kicking a spray of water against some tubing. The conversation above him stops, and he freezes, a ray of light from the tunnel filtering through the grate and across his face. He imagines the two men peering down through the grate, spotting him. Brother David and Ezekiel. Even as he wonders what they look like, his heart pounds in his chest, so loud it seems, they must hear it, too. His imagination conjures up the sound of a rifle bolt clicking into place, the sight of a muzzle poking through an opening of the grate, even the sound of the gunshot that will end his life. But then, the conversation starts again.

  “If you will forgive my sinful pride, Brother David, it would be a great honor to perform any tasks that would further the cause of righteousness.”

  “There is one thing,” the other voice says. “I am teaching a lesson to a heathen. Give her another few minutes. Then take these keys, and…”

  Using their voices as cover, Jericho carefully moves through the water down the tunnel, turning under what he knows is the galley-sleeping quarters. He looks up through the grate. Darkness. He takes a deep breath. He has two choices. He can stay in the sump, dashing around corners like a rat in a maze, or he can work his way up to the silo and the launch control capsule. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there, but he knows he’s not doing anyone any good where he is.

  Jericho removes the saw-toothed survival knife from a leg sheath and pries open the grate above his head. Then he pulls himself into the room, pauses a moment to let his eyes get accustomed to the dim light. He hears the unmistakable sound of strained breathing, senses the mixture of pain and fear, and as he turns and sees her in the yellowy light, his first thought is of a an animal caught in a trap.

  * * *

  Susan Burns sees the figure pulling itself out of the grate. The man turns toward her, an apparition appearing through a blazing fire of pain. Her body stiffens. She begins to cry out, but Jericho covers her mouth with his hand.

  “It’s me, doctor, Sergeant Jericho,” he whispers in her ear.

  It takes a moment, but she recognizes him and calms. He releases his grip then lifts her at the waist to relieve the pressure on her arms.

  “Thank God,” she says, her head falling onto his shoulder. Please get me out of here. He was going to…”

  Jericho reaches up toward the overhead pipe, finds the handcuffs and curses. He was hoping she was bound with rope. The saw-toothed knife is in his hand. Wrapped cylindrical handle, a removable cap for storing matches, compass and fishing line. It can saw down trees, clean a fish, or gut a man. But it cannot open handcuffs.

  Jericho digs at the lock with the tip of the knife, knowing it is useless. He is face-to-face with Susan, her legs wrapped around his hips instinctively, seeking shelter and protection. Her bare breasts are pressed against his chest, and he can hear her sobbing.

  “I can’t get it open,” he says. “But there’s a monkey wrench around here somewhere. Give me a minute. I’ll separate the pipe at the t-joint, and get you out of here.”

  “Don’t leave me,” she pleads, tightening the scissors hold of her legs, letting all her weight fold into him. He puts his arms around her, tastes a salty tear that runs from her face to his.

  Footsteps echo from the tunnel, interrupting them.

  “The pipe, Jericho. Break it! Do what you have to. Please, hurry.”

  He releases her, looks for a wrench, but doesn’t find it.

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nbsp; The footsteps grow louder.

  He leaps up, grabs the pipe and swings on it like a gymnast on the horizontal bar. He tries to pull the pipe down, but it holds firm, doesn’t even bend.

  The door opens, a beam of light shooting across the floor past the cots and toward them in the rear of the sleeping quarters. Jericho turns his head toward the grate in the floor.

  “Don’t you dare leave me,” Susan whispers, frantically.

  Anguished, Jericho moves toward the grate. “There’s nothing I can do.” He swings his legs into the opening to the sump. “We’re outnumbered and we’re trapped. I don’t even have a gun. I’ll get us both killed.”

  “Don’t go!”

  “I’ll come back for you.”

  “Jack!”

  The sound of his name on her lips chills him.

  “I promise. I’ll be back.”

  “Damn you! You coward!”

  The word cuts through him, and he drops into the sump as much to avoid her hateful glare as to escape. Pulling the grate back into place over his head, he sinks into the water, defeated and ashamed.

  * * *

  “I’ll come back for you.”

  His father looks up from beneath the fallen beam, the pain etched into his face. He says nothing. Water pours into the shaft, and from overhead comes the angry growl of the earth. Rock moves against rock, timbers snap in two. The growl becomes a deafening roar. Jack Jericho reaches down and grasps his father’s hand. His father latches onto Jericho’s sleeve, holds him there for a moment, then lets go. Still, the older man doesn’t say a word, doesn’t protest as Jericho backs down the tunnel, toward the shouts of the crew boss.

  “I’ll come back for you,” he says again, watching his father wince with pain. Jericho turns and scrambles toward the emergency egress ladder. He does not look back.