Ballistic Read online

  The Congressman is still a Colonel in the Reserves, but so what? Susan is acquainted with plenty of Marine officers who accept women as equals…or close to it.

  “The Corps was fighting the British before the Declaration of Independence was signed,” the Congressman continues. “We’ve made more than three hundred landings on foreign shores.”

  Not that the Congressman has landed on any foreign shores himself, Susan Burns knows, unless you counted congressional junkets to Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. Now what’s he saying?

  “We didn’t need women then, and we sure as hell don’t need them now, except for political expediency, and you know I don’t play those games.”

  No? What about stirring the pork barrel for a California defense contractor that makes guidance systems for missiles that are being mothballed? Susan Burns could tell from the Air Force Secretary’s look that he was probably thinking the same thing.

  “Our women pilots have excellent records,” Secretary Cabot says. “So do the women in support units.”

  “If you ask me, we’re just appeasing the left-wing, fem-Nazi contingent.”

  “Damn it, Chris! You’ve been in office so long, you’re starting to believe your own flack. It’s a new world out there, and we’ve got to make use of all the expertise we’ve got.”

  “Including lady shrinks, I suppose?”

  “I vouch for Dr. Burns, and that ought to be good enough for you.”

  Susan Burns stifles a smile. The old Air Force eagle still has some arrows in his quiver. “Gentlemen,” she says, “this isn’t about me and it isn’t about women. It’s about the readiness of the missile squadrons. The enemies are monotony, boredom, and a sense of futility. Not one missileer in fifty believes he – or she – will ever turn the key. If the President ordered a strike, there’s significant doubt the missileers would fire. They’d get the launch code and think it was a computer malfunction.”

  “Even if that’s true,” the Congressman says, “I fail to see how a shrink is going to help.”

  “Our preliminary studies show a marked decline in alertness and discipline. We need to construct psychological profiles of the men and women in the launch capsules, compile hard statistical data, then treat the problem.”

  The Congressman sips at his Scotch, then to the Secretary and waves his napkin, surrendering. “Okay, Warren. It’s your call, but if 60 Minutes comes calling about this boondoggle, I’ll refer them to you.”

  The two men exchange smiles, and Susan Burns finally understands. It had all been a charade. The Congressman never intended to block the project. He merely wanted artillery cover if the news media likened the project to price supports for bull semen or thousand-dollar balpeen hammers. If that happened, Susan Burns could go back to treating bed-wetting teenagers in suburban Virginia. I’ve got a lot to learn about politics, she thinks.

  A steward appears and silently slips a silver tray holding a small envelope in front of Secretary Cabot. Opening the envelope, the Secretary examines a note, his brow furrowing. “Isn’t that the damndest?”

  “What?” the Congressman asks.

  “You remember that break-in at the Denver Armory?”

  “Yeah, the Army lost some ordnance.”

  “Automatic weapons, ammunition and some obsolete land mines,” the Secretary says, looking around, then lowering his voice. “Plus enough plastiques to make the Beirut bombing look like a fraternity prank.”

  “That wasn’t in the reports.”

  “No, and neither will this. There was an explosion at a porn shop in New York last night. Traces of Semtex were found in the rubble. Based on the chemical composition, it’s special Army issue.”

  “So why rob an armory to blow up a porn shop?” the Congressman asks.

  “Excellent question,” Dr. Susan Burns says, patting her lips with a napkin, “and I’ll bet the answer can be found with a little Freudian flim-flam.”

  -4-

  Hell’s Half Acre

  The broad plains north of Rattlesnake Hills are broken by mountains and buttes rising unexpectedly from the flat earth. Wyoming is a land of contrasts. Towering mountains of granite that boiled up from inside the earth over three billion years ago. Flat prairies of wheatgrass and junegrass. Steppes covered with sweetly pungent sagebrush, the scent carried by the strong, continuous winds. On the arid badlands, eroded boulders form exotic sculptures in demonic shapes. Not far to the south, traces of wagon wheels carved into the rocks are still visible on the old Oregon Trail.

  Near the south fork of the Powder River, in an area of dry buttes and rocky gullies, is Hell’s Half Acre, a canyon of eroded pink rock, forming pinnacles that could be the frozen flames of Satan himself. Three miles to the west, near a stream, is rolling ranch land. Some is fenced, and cattle graze serenely on the grasslands that are also the home to jackrabbits, cottontails and rattlesnakes. Mule deer and pronghorn antelope feed in the nearby woods.

  Over a rise from the grazing cattle, farther from the stream, a man in commando fatigues uses wire cutters to snip through the bottom two strands of a barbed-wire fence. As he spreads the opening with gloved hands, eleven similarly dressed men wriggle through, belly-up, using their rifles to keep the wire from catching on their fatigues. In their wake, clouds of dust rise from the parched earth. In a moment the men are gone, and with the top wires still intact, the fence does not appear to have been breached.

  The commandos flatten themselves to the ground and creep ahead through the scrubby brush, holding their M-16A2’s, official U.S. Army issue, in front of them. They move slowly in what marine rifle squads call the “low crawl.” The morning sun is in their faces, which are painted loam and light green to blend in with the surroundings. They wear Kevlar body armor and carry extra magazines of 5.56 mm. ammunition in pouches on their cartridge belts. Their helmets are covered in brown burlap.

  As they move higher on the ridge, the brush becomes heavier, and the leader, Gabriel, a rock-jawed man of thirty with squinting blue eyes, cautiously stands and extends both arms away from his body at a forty-five degree angle. At the signal, the men get to their feet and move into wedge formations, a point man with three riflemen behind him. The two side units break away diagonally as Gabriel’s middle wedge moves straight up the ridge. A dozen men in all.

  Gabriel raises his right hand, and his unit stops. He reaches down, brushes some leaves away from the ground, exposing a trip wire, then leads his men around a buried land mine. At the top of the ridge, he signals again, and his men halt. Gabriel crawls to a vantage point where he can see into the hollow. Using binoculars, he scans the scrubby landscape. Four hundred meters away, halfway up the slope of the next ridge, is a bunker reinforced with sandbags, mounds of dirt, and logs. Twenty meters behind the bunker is a century-old miner’s cabin of blackened logs, its walls sagging into the ground.

  The target.

  To get there, his men will have to work their way down the ridge, cross the dry coulee in the hollow, then work their way back up the far ridge, in direct view of the bunker.

  Suicide.

  Gabriel knows the lesson taught every soldier since Gettysburg: one dug-in infantry man on high ground can stop three equally armed men advancing from low ground. He signals his RTO to crawl forward and uses the radio to call the point men of the other two wedges. “We’ll lay down some hellfire from here. You’ll flank them. Thirty seconds.”

  His men take positions at the top of the ridge, stretching out into the prone firing position. Two prop their rifles on bipods. “Ten seconds,” Gabriel says, then counts it down. On his command, they erupt with a blistering barrage, their weapons set on three-round bursts.

  But they must have been expected, for the return fire is immediate and overwhelming. His men flatten, grinding their faces into the ground, and for a moment, their guns are stilled. Gabriel, still standing, winces. He is a man with no fear of death. “Keep it steady!” he shouts, and his men resume firing. Good men, pious men. He prays for them to
succeed, to overcome their fears.

  Gabriel extends his right arm straight down, then moves it horizontally in the infantryman’s signal to fire faster. His men empty their magazines, clip in new ones and spray the hollow with shells, seldom hitting the bunker or its fortifications. They do, however, kill a lot of rocks.

  So different here than on the firing range, Gabriel thinks ruefully, as the return fire zips over their heads. But his troops will learn. The firing slows as the men catch their breaths. Combat drains the adrenaline, exhausts the soldier who hasn’t learned to pace himself. “Keep it up!” he implores them. “Fire.”

  At something, at anything, he wants to say. Gabriel is a generation too young to have served in Vietnam, but he has studied its history and knows the woeful inaccuracy of the infantry with the M-16A1. In many fire fights, it took an astonishing one hundred thousand rounds to inflict a single casualty. Lack of fire discipline and malfunctions. He knows that, at this moment, his men are firing wildly, perhaps blindly. He would have liked another month of training.

  Gabriel peers into the hollow and a flash of movement catches his eye in the sagebrush. His riflemen see it, too. They turn and fire, finally hitting something. He watches as the brown hide of a large animal, a deer or elk tumbles into the underbrush.

  Enough. If the distraction hasn’t worked already, laying down a few hundred more rounds won’t help. “Unit two, go!” he shouts into the radio. To his right, four commandos work their way down the ridge, but oblique fire from the bunker stops them just short of the coulee. They take cover behind dusty rocks in the dry riverbed. Unit two’s leader scans the left flank with his binoculars but cannot see any movement except for a jackrabbit that runs a zig-zag route away from the shooting.

  “Unit three, where are you?” Gabriel demands. “Matthew, go now!”

  “We’re halfway there. Relax, brother.” The voice is calm and reassuring. Halfway down the ridge, Matthew clicks off the radio as he leads his men through dense underbrush. He is tall with a thick neck and arms cabled with veins, his hands work-hardened. His men move quickly, breaking twigs, kicking over rocks, their movements masked by the blazing gunfire to their right. Speed, not stealth, is their ally now.

  As they cross the coulee, the four men slide into the rectangular “echelon left” formation with Matthew at the point. They have flanked the bunker and have a clear shot up the ridge to the miner’s cabin. Moving at double-time now, with rifles at port arms, they break into the clearing twenty meters from the cabin.

  Just outside the cabin door, a soldier has his back to them. He is peering down toward the bunker on the far side, his hand resting on an M-9 service pistol in a holster. They storm him, the soldier turning just in time to catch sight of Matthew slashing at his chest with a fixed bayonet. The soldier instinctively leaps backward, and the blade catches in his flak jacket. Matthew pivots and swings the rifle butt in a horizontal arc, belting the soldier across the jaw and toppling him to the ground. Two other commandos stand over him with rifle muzzles pointed to his chest as Matthew and a fourth commando burst through the flimsy cabin door.

  They tuck and roll and come up in the firing position. Their rifles are pointed directly at the head of a long-haired, handsome man of thirty who sits at a redwood table reading the Bible. The man, who calls himself Brother David, calmly presses the button on a stopwatch, closes his Bible and looks at Matthew with dark, piercing eyes. “Your best time, to date, my brother. Sliced a minute thirty-five off last week’s maneuver.” His serene smile is that of a king pleased with a loyal subject. “I believe we are ready.”

  Matthew takes off his helmet. His long hair is tied into a ponytail. “Perhaps two more weeks would be better.”

  “God waits for no man.”

  Matthew nods. His leader has spoken. “Thy will be done, Brother David.”

  The soldier from outside staggers into the cabin, his chin in his hand. Blood seeps from his mouth as he approaches Matthew. “You broke my jaw,” he whimpers through swollen lips.

  Brother David stands and clasps an arm around the wounded man’s shoulder. “That is nothing compared to the pain you will inflict on the army of Satan.”

  -5-

  Graveyard Shift

  The sun blinks through the tree tops on a crisp Wyoming morning. Towering blue spruce and Ponderosa pines form an umbrella over the two-lane road. It is September, and the Aspens are turning gold, their round leaves fluttering, whistling their songs in the wind. A red-headed woodpecker beats out a staccato beat against a fir tree, and somewhere in the underbrush, rabbit-like pikas are squeaking their distinctive sounds.

  The Air Force Jeep emerges from the forest and begins climbing through the Rattlesnake Hills. Road signs warn of moose crossings. Whitecapped mountains are visible on the horizon.

  Senior Airman Sayers is at the wheel of the Jeep, Airman Reynolds next to him. Jack Jericho is sprawled across the back seat, his helmet pulled over his eyes. “Sarge asleep?” Sayers asks.

  “Asleep, hungover, dead, or all of the above.” Reynolds runs a hand over his crew-cut. A freckled redhead with a southern accent, he wore his hair in a pony tail before joining the Air Force, and even now, cannot believe the stubbly bristle he finds under his hand.

  “Yo, Jack! You awake?” Sayers asks.

  From the back seat, an unintelligible grunt.

  “C’mon Jack. Get up.”

  “Leave me the hell alone.”

  Sayers jerks his thumb in Jericho’s direction. “That’s what two weeks on the captain’s graveyard shift does to a man.”

  “Not to mention ten years of hard drinking,” Reynolds adds.

  Sayers downshifts as the grade becomes steeper. A stream runs alongside the road, clear water tumbling over rocks as old as the earth itself. Above the bank of the stream, a porcupine gnaws at the trunk of a pine tree. Across the road is a seemingly endless chain-link fence topped by razor wire. “No Trespassing” signs emblazoned with the Air Force insignia dot the fence every several hundred yards.

  “Uh-oh,” Sayers says, looking toward the sky and slowing down.

  “What is it, Spike?” Reynolds asks.

  Sayers’ first name is Timothy, but with his round glasses and narrow face, his buddies back in Brooklyn thought he looked like Spike Lee. Before he joined the Air Force, Sayers sometimes cadged free drinks and impressed aspiring models and actresses by claiming he was scouting the neighborhood for a movie location. He still tries the scam occasionally while on leave, but less successfully. At a bar in Laramie, he discovered, the locals didn’t know Spike Lee from Robert E. Lee.

  “Buzzards dead ahead,” Sayers says.

  Jericho stirs and sits up, sliding back his helmet, squinting into the morning sun. He’s unshaven and his eyes are puffy. He pulls a warm can of beer from a rucksack, pops the top and puts it to his lips. He gargles noisily, spits into the road, then opens the wrapper on a Twinkie and gobbles it in two bites.

  “Disgusting,” Reynolds says. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Back home, I’d have hominy grits, black coffee and molasses bread every morning.”

  “Hey Reynolds,” Jericho says, his voice thick from a case of the dry tongue. “If I gotta hear one more time about your momma’s eggs still warm from the chicken’s ass, I’m gonna puke.”

  Sayers laughs. “Hell, Jack. You’re liable to puke, anyway.”

  “I was just being friendly,” Reynolds says, pouting. “Besides, eggs don’t come out a chicken’s ass.”

  Jericho ignores both of them and watches half-a-dozen turkey vultures drift in slow circles overhead. A year of perimeter maintenance duty with these two, and he still marvels at the weirdness of their conversations. Within a few minutes, they start up again.

  “Hey Sayers, how many folks are there in Wyoming like you?”

  “You mean handsome and manly?”

  “I mean black.”

  “Not many, man. Three thousand or so, not counting me.”

  “
That’s why there’s no graffiti.”

  “There’s no graffiti ‘cause there’s nothing in this hayseed heaven to put it on ‘cept trees and rocks. Graffiti goes on underpasses and buildings in the projects, and if you got the balls, the po-lice station.”

  “Yeah, well it ain’t so bad out here,” Reynolds says. “Even Jericho likes it when he’s sober.”

  Now, Sayers stops the Jeep alongside the fence, then shoots a concerned look into the backseat. “More nightmares last night, Jack?”

  Jericho’s grunt could be a yes, could be a no.

  The buzzards are directly overhead, circling lazily in the wind currents, waiting. Now, the men see what the birds are after. A large elk with a full crown of antlers is caught in the fence, its hide bloodied from the struggle to get free.

  “Never told me this Wild Kingdom shit in the recruitment office,” Reynolds complains.

  “All I ever heard,” Sayers says, “was that wild blue yonder jive.” He jams on the hand brake, and the three men get out and cautiously approach the elk.

  When they are ten feet away, Sayers pulls a .45 from a side holster, but Jericho seizes his wrist. “No need for that, Spike.”

  Reynolds lets out a low whistle in Jericho’s direction. “It lives! It talks, it walks, it brushes its teeth with Budweiser.”

  Jericho grabs a saw-toothed survival knife from a sheath on his leg. “You two cowboys back off. I’ll handle this.”

  Amused, Reynolds slouches against a wooden fence post and lights a cigarette. “Here we go again. Daniel Friggin’ Boone.”

  Three feet from the trapped elk, Jericho stops, the frightened animal watching him through eyes the size of half-dollars. “Hoo boy,” Jericho coos. “You are a beauty.”

  Blood oozing from its wounds, the animal bucks and stomps, lifting its head until it can no longer see Jericho. With startling quickness, Jericho leaps forward, grasps its antlers, and raises his knife to the elk’s neck.