Ballistic Page 8

  “Jericho a missileer? Hardly. When he’s not AWOL, he mops up the sump.”

  Jericho clears his throat. “Begging the captain’s pardon, I maintain the launch eject gas generators, sir.”

  “You pathetic excuse for an airman,” Pukowlski fumes. “Sergeant, you just earned yourself a job so deep in the hole you can apply for Chinese citizenship!”

  “So this sergeant’s duties are underground?” Susan asks, the shadow of a thought crossing her face.

  Pukowlski is puzzled. “Yeah, why? Can you think of a way we can leave him there when we implode the silo?”

  “I think I’ve found my first guinea pig.”

  “Jericho ain’t crazy, doc. Lazy and stupid maybe, but not crazy.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jericho says.

  Susan Burns studies him. “I think there’s more to Sergeant Jack Jericho than meets the eye.” She looks him up and down, and at that moment, the tail of a fish emerges from his boxers. “Sergeant, is that a trout in your shorts, or are you just happy to see me?”

  Jericho is too embarrassed to answer.

  Pukowlski is apoplectic. “Dammit, Jericho! You were under strict orders to complete your perimeter duties and return immediately to the base, not go fishing.”

  “Fishing, sir?”

  “Yeah, fishing. You expect me to believe that rainbow just jumped into your shorts.”

  “No, sir. But fish have been known to leap into my boat just to save time.”

  Dr. Burns clears her throat and says, almost apologetically. “I’m afraid I have to agree with the captain’s conclusion that you’ve been fishing, sergeant. Even Henry David Thoreau would find the evidence compelling.”

  “Who?” Pukowlski demands.

  “A writer fellow,” Jericho helps out. “He said that sometimes circumstantial evidence is very strong, ‘as when you find a trout in the milk.’”

  Dr. Burns arches her eyebrows and gives a little smile. “You’re a man of surprises, Sergeant Jericho.”

  “The Maine Woods is my favorite book,” Jericho explains, “other than the Launch Generator Maintenance Manual, of course.”

  “What the hell does milk have to do with this?” Pukowlski growls. “If you’re thinking about getting the cook to try a new recipe, forget it. That trout is history, and so are you. Drop the fish, sergeant.”

  “Respectfully, sir—”

  “Now! That’s an order.”

  “But if—”

  “No if’s, and’s, or but’s! Now! Cut it loose.”

  Jericho takes his knife and slices the drawstring of his boxers. Three trout drop to the ground along with the boxer shorts. Dr. Burns’s eyes flick to Jack’s groin.

  “Well, sergeant,” she says, smiling, “I’m happy to see you, too.”

  -17-

  Tunnel Rat

  Cool and damp deep inside the mountain, a steady fifty-eight degrees. Beneath the silo floor, the launch generator beats its steady thumpa-thumpa. The missile hangs in its cables, waiting. Always waiting.

  The gantry, a metal work cage, sits halfway up the silo wall, just below the level of a mesh grating. The grating hangs open, and inside, an exhaust tube runs upward at a slight angle from the silo to the dry river bed one hundred feet above. Acidic residue from tests of the launch generator coats the inside of the exhaust tube. Spiders spin webs across its three foot diameter, and field mice scamper along its length, claws scratching against the metal.

  Jack Jericho crawls upward, scouring the tube with a soapy brush. It is a task as useful as scrubbing the inside of a car’s tailpipe…three days before junking the car.

  “Hey, tunnel rat!” The voice echoes through the tube from the silo. A touch of Georgia. Reynolds’ voice. “Gotta borrow your elevator. Have a nice crawl.”

  Shit. Jericho hears the electrical whir of the gantry riding its rails down toward the silo floor. Reynolds enjoying it, getting even with him for the knife trick, he knows. Now, Jericho either has to squirm all the way to the top and pry off the screen on the exhaust pipe in the river bed, or go back into the silo and leap onto the ladder that runs up the wall. It’s only four feet from the exhaust tube opening to the ladder, but if you miss, it’s eighty feet straight down.

  Jericho keeps scrubbing, knowing that when the tube bends and he loses the light from the silo, the sweats will begin. Not that he won’t be able to see. He’s wearing the Air Force’s version of a miner’s helmet. But when he flicks the lamp on, when the shadows begin dancing up the wall, when the distant sound of the launch generator becomes the rumble of the pumps in the mine, the visions will start.

  Jonah may have been stuck in the gut of the whale, he thinks, but I’m jammed up its rectum.

  Jericho hauls himself around the first bend in the tube and reaches up to turn on the helmet lamp. As he does, an exposed bolt catches his sleeve. His arm is bent at an awkward angle above his head, and for a moment, he is stuck. He tries to wriggle backward, but the curvature of the tube stops him. Sweat streams down his face. From somewhere above him, he hears the pinging of groundwater dripping into the tube.

  He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to shut it out, but he cannot. He tries reciting Thoreau. “‘Talk of mysteries. Think of our life in nature – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid earth!’”

  But the earth is not solid here. It spins around him. He is dizzy, nauseous. The pinging grows louder, becomes the roar of rushing water, and now there’s no stopping the ghostly shapes that form in the darkness. The roar of the water becomes deafening, and a thousand noises mingle, then echo from inside the cavern. The crashing timbers, the crackling wires and the screams. Always, the screams.

  Feeling the water rising around him, the visions come, too. He sees men crushed under tons of rock and wood, hears the life squeezed out of them. Their bodies become skeletons, crawling toward him, bones clacking, grasping for him, reaching, reaching…

  To drown it out, to hide from the hideous din, to run from the blood-soaked bony hands, he bellows into the darkness, the wail of a wounded animal. Time and again, he shrieks at the night, at his own fear and shame.

  -18-

  Rye Whiskey I Cry

  “Would you describe yourself as a leader or a follower?” Dr. Susan Burns asks, looking up from a notepad.

  Jack Jericho stretches his neck. Sitting in straight-backed chairs always seemed unnatural. “Don’t your fancy books have any other choices?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like loner. I just want to be left the hell alone.”

  “Would you rather be rich or famous?” she asks.

  “Neither one interests me. But if I was rich, I’d buy an Orvis graphite fishing rod.”

  “Feared or respected?”

  “I just want to go through life without hurting anybody else. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Burns says, “is it?”

  Jericho scowls and doesn’t answer.

  “Perhaps we can place these questions in the context of your life.

  Tell me what you remember about the mountains,” Dr. Burns gently orders.

  “The flowers in the spring. Mountain laurel, azaleas, a bunch of others, I’m not sure of their names. And the birds, hoot owls and whippoorwills, and quail in the pine forests. When they whistle, it sounds like they’re calling out, ‘Bob White.’ You can hunt them in season, but I never did. I laid out seed in the back yard and made friends with a couple of them every year. They were darn near tame.”

  The sounds around them are not the calls of birds in the forest but the constant thumpa-thumpa of the launch generator below them in the sump. They are sitting in metal chairs in the Launch Equipment Room, halfway down the tunnel that runs from the launch control capsule to the missile silo. Around them are metal shelves stacked with huge batteries, cables, electrical gear and spare parts. A bare 75-watt bulb illuminates the room, casting shadows across the floor.

  Jericho has cleaned up. He’s in the utility uniform of olive
coveralls, three stripes on his sleeve, no medals on his chest. Dr. Susan Burns, in her blue business suit, looks at him with the practiced demeanor of detached professionalism. “What first comes to mind when you think of home?”

  “Home baked bread slathered with molasses.”

  “How did you and your friends spend your time?”

  He pulls a package of Zig-Zag cigarette papers from his pocket. “When we weren’t reading Dostoevski, you mean?”

  “Sergeant, this is serious.”

  Jericho slips into a down-home Appalachian accent. “Hell, doc, us hillbillies kept busy shuckin’ corn, raisin’ barns, and duelin’ banjos. Once we got the cable, everythin’ changed. Movin’ pitchers all the way from New York City.”

  “Your use of self-deprecating humor to change the subject is an obvious ploy,” Dr. Burns says, drumming her pencil on a note pad.

  “Is it, doctor? Or is it a manifestation of primary anxiety, a response of the ego to increases in instinctual tension?”

  Her drumming stops in mid-beat. She opens Jericho’s personnel file and thumbs through it. “You had three years of college.”

  “Guilty as charged. All that book learnin’ and look where it got me.”

  “Why’d you drop out? Your grades were exemplary.” She looks up from the file and shoots him a quizzical look. “You majored in English, and…” She smiles at him. “You minored in psychology.”

  Jericho doesn’t answer, just tamps some tobacco into a cigarette paper. She resumes reading, then says, “After your junior year at W.V.U., you took a summer job in the coal mines. Your father was a miner, wasn’t he?”

  Jericho licks the paper closed and slips the cigarette into the corner of his mouth but doesn’t light it. “My daddy used to take seventy five pounds of corn meal and mix it with three hundred pounds of sugar, a little yeast, some bran and about three hundred gallons of water. In four days, voila, or as we say in the mountains, ‘Holy shit.’ Fifty gallons of mountain dew, or if you prefer, whiskey.”

  “Your father was a bootlegger.”

  “No, Al Capone was a bootlegger. My daddy was a moonshiner who didn’t give up his day job. ‘Course, in the mines, it’s always night, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me about your father.”

  “What’s to tell?”

  “Were you embarrassed by his illegal activities?”

  Jericho laughs. “No, was Richard Nixon’s family? Look, there’s nothing wrong with moonshining. The government lets you bake bread and sell it to your neighbors, but not cook up some rye whiskey. Mountain folk are independent and don’t necessarily listen to the government, which never did much for them anyway. My daddy’s daddy made corn liquor and drove it to his customers down valley. I don’t know what he enjoyed more, sipping the whiskey or driving like a bat out of hell, avoiding the revenuers.”

  “So you admired your grandfather?”

  “He was his own man, didn’t take orders from anyone.”

  “And you do?”

  “I take orders from everyone from an E-6 to the President. Hell, I even take orders from a lady shrink.”

  “Did your grandfather work in the mines, too?”

  “He was a farmer, forty acres of rocks and sandy topsoil. In the winter, he made whiskey. You know why they call them moonshiners?”

  “Why?”

  “‘They work at night so the revenuers can’t see the smoke from the stills.” Jericho breaks into a song:

  “Rye whiskey, rye whiskey,

  Rye whiskey I cry.

  If I can’t get rye whiskey,

  I surely will die.”

  Susan Burns looks at him sternly.

  “What’d you expect?” he asks. “John Denver?”

  “Your father,” Dr. Burns says.

  “What about him?”

  “When I asked about him, you changed the subject to your grandfather, then to the etymology of moonshining, and finally to a mountain song.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Oh, but you do. You purposely avoid talking about your father.”

  “If I did talk, would it bring him back?”

  “No. But it might bring you back.”

  Jericho shakes his head. “I’ve done this before.”

  “Do it again. Tell me about your father.”

  “My daddy drove a ‘60 Dodge with the heaviest springs you ever saw. Forty cases in the car, and it wouldn’t sink an inch. No one ever caught him either.”

  “What are you leaving out?”

  He avoids her gaze. “Leaving out?”

  “The day job,” she says, sternly. “Tell me about the mine.”

  His eyes harden. “You’ve read my file. You know all about it.”

  “If you don’t cooperate, I’m required to report you to the captain.”

  “The captain can kiss me where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Very colorful. You play the role convincingly.”

  The unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth wags at her. “It’s not a role. It’s who I am.”

  Her voice is harsh and reproachful. “It’s who you were. But you left the mountains ten years ago. You’ve been stationed on six different bases around the world. You read books, which believe me, sets you apart. Yet you cling to your earlier identity.”

  “Can any of us escape our identities?”

  “Do you want to?”

  He smiles ruefully. “I forgot. You shrinks don’t answer questions. You just scoop ‘em up and toss ‘em back like a quick-fingered shortstop.” He sighs and says, “What do you want to know?”

  “Your feelings after the accident in the mine.”

  He looks into the darkness. The thumpa of the generators is not unlike the pumps in the mine. He closes his eyes and feels the cold, black water filling the shaft, knee-deep now. He reaches out, trying to catch onto a wet, rocky wall, but his hand slips off. A powerful shearing sound from above, the earth ripping itself apart. He has lost his helmet and covers his head with his hands. Rocks pelt him, and a roar thunders from above. A falling beam glances off him, slashing his shoulder and back. Even now, he winces with pain and opens his eyes to see Dr. Susan Burns looking at him with compassion. He has seen the look before and hates it. Hates his own weakness that attracts the sympathy of others.

  “My feelings,” he says, bitterly, “were real simple. My father and brother were dead, and I wanted to be.”

  “Why do you blame yourself? Could you have saved them?”

  “I could have tried. Instead, I ran.”

  “According to the reports, you followed procedure. You went to the emergency shaft and the evacuation route.”

  “Right, I followed orders,” he says sarcastically.

  “You did what you were supposed to do.”

  “I did what I was told to do.” He lets it hang there, remembering. He can hear the gantry inside the silo running up its track. Beneath them, the mixture of a dozen mechanical and hydraulic sounds. “For a long time, I thought about killing myself, but the closest I got was nearly drinking myself to death.”

  Neither speaks for a long moment until she says, “Is that why your wife left you?”

  Jericho’s laugh is little more than a rasp. “Cleaning up my puke at three in the morning sorely tested her patience.”

  “I understand your running from your past, but why do you hide your intelligence?”

  “Why do you hide your sexuality?” he shoots back.

  For a moment, they both listen to the pumps and the thumping generator below them. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

  “Somewhere, someplace, someone told you that your good looks were a hindrance in your profession. So you don’t wear makeup. Your blue suit with its Little Bo Peep white silk blouse and bow is right out of a Dress for Success guide in some woman’s magazine that probably also gives advice for orgasms in five minutes or less without the nuisance of a companion. You’re not married or engaged, at least, you’re not wearing any rings. In fa
ct, you’re not wearing any jewelry, unless we count that sports watch that’s waterproof to forty feet. I figure you use the built-in stopwatch to get your twenty-five minutes on the treadmill at a trendy gym in Georgetown where the TV’s are tuned to C-Span instead of ESPN.”

  “Actually, I use it to time those five-minute orgasms.”

  Jericho laughs. “But you do have a sense of humor, Dr. Burns, and that makes up for a lot.”

  She turns away, her cheeks coloring. “I can’t believe I said that, Sergeant. Forgive me. It was very unprofessional of me.”

  Now, Jericho studies her. After a moment, he smiles broadly. “No, it wasn’t. It was very professional. Nicely done, but the shy blush was a little over the top. It was your effort to break through to me, to show you’re human. Or maybe it’s even more complicated. Maybe, you’re encouraging some transference. Maybe you want me to relate to you as if you’re my long lost wife.”

  “Sergeant Jack Jericho,” she says, a touch wistfully, “you are a man full of surprises, and you are so much smarter than you look.”

  “Thanks, doc,” Jericho replies, slouching in his chair and flicking the unlit cigarette through a grating into the black water of the sump. “And you’re purtier than a trussed-up hog on Christmas Eve.”

  She exhales a sigh and closes his file, then clicks her pen closed and slides it into a pouch in her notebook. “All right, Jericho. Let’s make a deal. You stop playing hayseed and I’ll stop playing doctor.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “We talk. Has it ever occurred to you that you may not be the only one to have suffered a loss?”

  He gauges the seriousness of her look and says, “I’m listening.”

  “I’ll tell you a story about a father who was a psychiatrist and also taught at the university, a mother who was active in the P.T.A., and a nine-year-old tomboy with freckles who could skip rope blindfolded and hit a baseball farther than any of the boys.”

  “The American ideal,” he says, tentatively.

  “So what question should you ask, Jericho?”