Ballistic Read online

  * * *

  Ezekiel works his way to the rear of the sleeping quarters, sees Susan suspended from the pipe, and stops. He studies her, notes her exposed breasts, then looks her in the eyes. “Man is weak. Even the Messiah in human form knows sin.”

  He reaches for her, and she shrinks back, turning her head away. But Ezekiel merely pulls her torn blouse closed, trying to cover her breasts. Then he reaches up and unlocks her handcuffs. She falls to the floor and rubs her wrists, trying to work the blood back into her hands.

  She puts her bra back on and tries to tuck in the blouse, but without the buttons, it’s useless. Ezekiel moves to a metal shelving unit and pulls down a missileer’s blue jumpsuit, which he tosses to her. “Put this on. Rachel sees you like that, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  -33-

  Death Waits in the Dark

  The OH-58D Kiowa helicopter swings out of the shadows of Chugwater Mountain and descends from a position over the reservoir, following the path of the aqueduct down to the missile base on the plateau below. In Vietnam, the Kiowa led air cavalry assaults and located targets for attack helicopters. Today, the modified version is still a small, maneuverable chopper without much firepower, except when it’s equipped with Hellfire and Stinger missiles. This one is in the scout mode with no armaments. Instead, it carries three men in its cramped compartment, an Army pilot and two passengers in full battle dress.

  Colonel Henry Zwick, with twenty-five years experience in Armored Cavalry, slips on a helmet as they pass near the open missile silo, chunks of the blown concrete cap scattered in pieces on the ground. The colonel has salt and pepper hair and a jet black handlebar mustache that is more Salvador Dali than West Point.

  Captain Kyle Clancy sits next to him, his camouflage pants bloused neatly into his combat boots. A jagged scar runs from the corner of his left eye down across the cheekbone and disappears under his pugnacious chin. The patch on his sleeve reads, “Death Waits in the Dark,” the slogan of the Night Stalkers, the Army’s cutthroat Special Forces unit.

  The chopper dips lower and the two officers can see the bodies of airmen in front of the barracks, the shattered front gate, and the dead air policemen on the ground.

  “What an unholy mess,” Colonel Zwick says, shaking his head.

  Captain Clancy makes a sound that reminds the colonel of a horse snorting. “Typical Air Force goat fuck,” the captain says. “They couldn’t defend an assault by a troop of Eagle scouts.”

  “Easy, Kyle. We’re all on the same side.”

  “Shit, colonel, you know I’m right. The flyboys are trained monkeys. They’re fine at pulling the trigger on some smart bomb at twenty thousand feet, just like playing a video game in an arcade. Put a bayonet at their throats, they piss their pants.”

  Overhead, a shadow crosses in front of the sun as a dozen CH-47 Chinook helicopters edge past the mountain and descend. The huge, two-rotor choppers carry troops toward a makeshift base camp just above the missile base on an elevated plateau. On the ground, tents are going up, men are digging in, and trees fall in the path of M1A2 Abrams battle tanks and M2/3 Bradley fighting vehicles with cannons, grenade and missile launchers.

  Captain Clancy doesn’t even try to suppress a sneer as he gestures toward the base camp. “No disrespect intended, colonel, but we don’t need all that armor. And we don’t need Rangers or Green Berets, either. Hell, my men could—”

  “You’ll have your chance, Kyle. But first, let’s get an idea of what we’re up against.”

  The Army pilot turns around and asks, “Another pass?”

  Colonel Zwick points toward the ground. “Take it lower and see if we can get a rise out of them.”

  Captain Clancy smiles, stretching the scar at the corner of his mouth. The colonel might look like a pussy, but he’s earned his eagle and arrows. Plus an oak leaf cluster and a couple of silver stars. After West Point, Zwick was commissioned a second lieutenant with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam and later Cambodia. It was the old Army, using outdated tactics of static warfare where the premium was on superior firepower alone. The Armored Cav had forgotten lessons first learned in the Bronze Age by Kazakh warriors who harnessed horses to chariots, all the better to hurl spears at their enemies.

  In the recriminations that followed the Vietnam War, the Army changed. A mobile, fluid fighting force was created, and Colonel Zwick was in the forefront. After tours in Germany and studies at the Armed Forces Staff College and the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, Colonel Henry Zwick was part of the most successful cavalry operation in history: Operation Saber of Desert Storm. The new Army was high-tech. Soldiers carried cellular phones and Global Positioning Receivers that gave their precise location by satellite. Weaponry had reached new dimensions from smart bombs to long-rod penetrators, officially known as high-velocity, armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding-sabot projectiles. In layman’s terms, it’s a 120 mm. shell made of tungsten or depleted-uranium alloys, and it exits the muzzle of a tank’s smoothbore gun at an astonishing Mach 4. It was used to pierce the armor of Iraqi tanks at a distance of more than three miles.

  Reconnaissance was handled by remote-controlled aircraft and the sophisticated Fox recon vehicles that sense chemical warfare devices. Zwick’s tank corps was equipped with the M1A2 Abrams, “Whispering Death,” the world’s best main battle tank manned by the world’s best tank crews. Multiple-launch rocket systems and self-propelled 155 mm. howitzers added firepower.

  Amazingly, the technology all worked.

  Colonel Zwick commanded a unit of the 2nd Armored Cavalry that engaged Iraq’s Tawakalna Division in the Battle of 73 Easting, annihilating the enemy. In one hundred hours of fighting, the Armored Cav routed three Republican Guard divisions, destroyed the Iraqi’s 10th and 12th Armored Divisions and the 17th Infantry Division. They destroyed 4,000 Iraqi combat vehicles and took 24,000 prisoners. Only 42 American soldiers were killed and 192 wounded.

  So how difficult could it be, Colonel Zwick wondered, to take back a missile silo from a bunch of half-baked terrorists? Not hard at all. Unless the bastards could pull the trigger on the missile. That changed the equation.

  The Kiowa descends, hovering a moment over the security building where the blown doors are clearly visible. The sound of gunshots is drowned out by the chopper’s engine, but tiny puffs of smoke come from nearby trees, commandos firing at them. Neither the colonel nor the captain flinches, and the pilot takes evasive action, the chopper banking then cutting a figure-8 above the missile base.

  With a look of disdain, Captain Clancy watches the commandos take aim from positions in the trees and behind makeshift bunkers. “Dumb bastards are hiding, can’t tell a recon mission from an assault.” Unlike the colonel, Captain Clancy didn’t have the benefit of higher education, unless you count El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti. Years ago, he was a grunt who couldn’t stay out of trouble in Basic Training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Though he regularly led his unit in the rugged physical tests and otherwise showed respect for his superiors, Clancy was an improviser on duty and a brawler off duty. The former troubled commanders who prefer followers, not independent thinkers. The latter caused concern in the New Army.

  Clancy busted up bars, never backing down from an insult or a fight. Once in a tavern, he tore off a woman’s red dress and wore it as an ascot. His defense to the M.P.’s was simple. In the war games, his unit was green. Red was the enemy. The woman turned out to be a lieutenant’s wife, and Clancy was either going to end up in the stockade or on a bus home until a J.A.G. lawyer suggested the Special Forces. It was the perfect place for someone who could think on his feet and react with controlled fury when the coach called his number.

  During the invasion of Panama, dressed in black and wearing night vision goggles, Clancy leapt out of a hovering MH-6 Little Bird helicopter onto the roof of the Càrcel Modelo prison. As Delta Force snipers picked off guards in front of the prison, Clancy blew open a steel door with plas
tique explosives, then with three other commandos, raced down the stairs. He shot three guards with a laser-scoped MP-5 Heckler & Koch machine gun, then used more explosives to blow open the cell of a CIA operative who would surely have been killed in retaliation for the invasion. Clancy led the operative up to the roof and the waiting chopper, which was shot down as it lifted off. A U.S. armored personnel carrier evacuated Clancy, the other commandos and the operative with no loss of American life. Just another day in the Special Forces.

  Clancy loved all the action, but Desert Storm was his favorite. On G-minus-2, two days before the start of the ground war, he led a recon team across the border into Iraq. His job was to find a route through the mine fields and tank traps and also draw enemy fire so Colonel Zwick’s 2nd Armored Cavalry could locate Iraqi positions. Clancy had the perfect temperament to be a human trip wire. He enjoyed being shot at nearly as much as he enjoyed shooting back.

  On the Saudi-Iraq border, hundreds of thousands of Coalition troops were gathered: the British Desert Rats, French Foreign Legionnaires, the Arab Task Force, and of course, the might of the U.S. Army, the 82nd and 101st Airborne, the 1st and 24th Infantry, the 1st and 2nd Cavalry, the 1st and 3rd Armored Division. But across the border, inside Iraq, scuttling through mine fields and over trenches, were the Night Stalkers, some on foot, some in Light Armored Vehicles (LAV’s), daring the enemy to shoot, then firing back with their 25-millimeter Bushmaster chain guns.

  On G-minus-1, Clancy and his men did the job too well. Brazenly hurdling flaming tank traps, the Night Stalkers apparently convinced the Iraqis that the main invasion was underway. The Iraqis responded with heavy artillery, 122 mm. rockets, tanks and FROG missiles. Which, of course, was what Clancy wanted all along, because it gave him a chance to stand and fight instead of just “flashing our petticoats and running home to Mama,” which was what he called decoy missions.

  Clancy stood atop his unarmored HUMVEE, firing TOW missiles at the Iraqis T-62 tanks, taking out three with direct hits, while his men pinpointed artillery positions and picked off Iraqi infantry with machine gun fire.

  Now, as the Kiowa dips to five hundred feet, Clancy can imagine the crackle of small-arms fire from the ground, though he cannot hear it. He and the colonel peer down and see commandos running haphazardly from the security building, firing rifles at them. A lone bullet pings off a landing skid.

  “Amateurs,” Clancy says. “We’ll go through them like a knife through an eyeball.”

  “I think the expression is, ‘a knife through butter,’” the colonel says.

  The captain smiles, and the scar at the corner of his mouth stretches and whitens. “Not where I come from, colonel.”

  -34-

  Run Jericho, Run

  Jack Jericho carefully slides the grate from its grooves and pulls himself out of the sump and onto the floor of the missile silo. He is directly below the suspended Peacekeeper missile. As he gets to his feet, he is shocked to find himself ten feet behind a man in a dark suit. The man, whose long hair is tied back in a ponytail, is staring straight up into the burners of the rocket. Jericho drops into a stalking crouch, takes a step and comes down on the outside ball of his foot, rolls to the inside ball, then lowers his heel. He’s practiced in the woods, so that the stalking crouch could bring him close enough to a deer to hear its breathing. Now, deliberate as a heron stalking a frog, he approaches the man from behind.

  There is a sense that is part sight and part sound, and yet it does not depend on the eyes or ears. A warning reflex, an electrical synapse more finely tuned in prehistoric man where the rustle of leaves or the breaking of a twig could mean danger or death. Sensing movement he can neither see nor hear, the man whirls around. Jericho leaps out of his crouch and grabs him by his ponytail, yanking his head back, and sliding the saw-toothed knife under his neck. “Who are you!” Jericho demands.

  Startled, Brother David peers over his shoulder at Jericho, but it only takes a moment to regain his composure. “Bitte tue mir nichts!”

  “What! What the hell are you saying?”

  David trembles. His look is pure terror. He is a good enough actor to fool Jericho, who releases the pressure on David’s ponytail, then gets a look at his profile. There is something familiar about the man. “Who are you?”

  No answer, just the same terrified look.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Deutschland.”

  “Oh.” Jericho spots the dried blood on the man’s shirt and suit coat. “Jeez, are you hurt?” He lets go and sheaths his knife. “You’re with the U.N., aren’t you? I think I must have seen you yesterday in the silo.”

  David nods at him.

  “Have you been shot?”

  “Nein. One of the others,” David says, affecting a German accent. “The Englishmen. He died in my arms.”

  “Oh, God. You get separated from the group?”

  “Ya.”

  “Look, all hell’s broken loose, but I guess you know that. We’ve got to do something or more people will be killed. Maybe a lot more people.”

  David fixes him with a look of wordless astonishment.

  “You guys should have shut this place down yesterday,” Jericho says.

  “Ya, gestern.”

  “You better stick with me.” Thinking this guy isn’t going to be much help, Jericho just wants to get him out of the silo. He speaks slowly, hoping the man understands. “I’ll get us out of here, and we can call in the Marines.”

  “Ya, waffen,” David says, smiling obligingly.

  They walk to the gantry and get on, David trailing slightly behind. Jericho pulls a lever, and the gantry begins to ascend the silo wall against the backdrop of the black PK missile. “Their leader’s some kind of religious psycho. Had a woman psychiatrist strung up like a gutted deer. We’ve got to get her out of here and bring in some help, pronto.”

  “This woman,” David says, slowly, as if trying out the words for the first time. “Is she your geliebte, your sweetheart?”

  “Fat chance. A woman like that. What would she see in me?”

  Jericho pulls back the lever, and the gantry stops one hundred feet above the silo floor. He points toward the wall where a screen covers an exhaust tube. “We’ll get out through that tube. It runs up to a river bed.”

  “We will be wet,” David says deliberately.

  “No. We’d be under water now if the river was still there. The water’s dammed at a reservoir on top the mountain. Just a little trickle in an aqueduct now, and the river bed’s as dry as Army pot roast.”

  David does not appear to understand.

  “C’mon,” Jericho urges him. “You’re not afraid of tight spaces, are you?”

  “Nein.”

  “Good, ‘cause I am.”

  Jericho removes two screws from the top of the screen and pulls it open. Suddenly, a voice crackles, and David reaches into his suit pocket for a walkie-talkie. “Angel, this is Eden,” a man’s voice says through the static. “Do you read me?”

  “What the hell is that?” Jericho asks.

  David smiles placidly, pivots and hooks a sucker punch into his gut. Jericho doubles over, gasping for breath, and David smashes the walkie-talkie across his skull. A blaze of fireworks ignites Jericho’s eyes, and he struggles not to black out. David locks his hands together and brings them down hard on the back of Jericho’s neck, knocking him to the floor of the gantry. Jericho gets to one knee, but David kicks him in the chest, knocking him back down.

  “A patient,” David says.

  The world spinning around him, Jericho isn’t sure what he heard. “What?”

  “Your lady friend, the shrink. You asked what she would see in you. She’d see you as a patient, Sergeant Jericho, a pathetic loser, a wanderer who has lost his way and who turns to secular healing for answers that will not come.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ve read your file, sergeant.”

  Jericho is on all fours, trying to
clear the cobwebs from his brain. He looks up at David, and now it comes to him. “I remember. You’re the preacher on the horse. You kept the sun at your back so I never made out your face.”

  “You are blind, Jericho. Even with the sun at your back, you would not see.”

  “And you’re going to show me the light, right preacher?”

  “Oh, but I shall. Jericho, you carry the name of a city ten thousand years old. Are you a believer?”

  “Not in politicians or preachers.”

  David kicks him again, this time in the ribs. He’s flat on the floor of the gantry now, gasping as David kicks him again, pushing him toward the ledge. Then a downward swing with the walkie-talkie smashes an ankle hard on the bone, and Jericho yelps and tries to scramble to his knees but the movement takes him closer to the ledge.

  “You’ve got to be saved, sergeant.”

  Another kick digs into Jericho’s abdomen, and a moment later, the acrid taste of bile fills his mouth. He tries to get to his knees, but his hand slips over the ledge. He looks down, dizzily. The silo floor swirls around him.

  “You can die saved or die damned,” David says. “It makes no difference to me.”

  “Is there a third choice?” Jericho asks, spitting blood.

  “You’re a heathen and a fool!” David prods Jericho with a foot, and one leg slides off the ledge. Jericho tries to grab at the smooth metal flooring, but he can’t get a grip. With a final, vicious kick, David sends Jericho over the ledge.

  Plunging into space.

  The smooth black missile just feet away, seeming to launch as he plummets.

  Reaching out, windmilling his arms, grabbing for something, anything.

  Just above the polished steel floor, his arm hooks the thick umbilical cord that runs from the silo wall to the warhead.