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  Strong. This strong man had an air of unmistakable authority and intelligence that precisely suited his missile-specialist’s coveralls, and the dashing gold scarf at his throat only completed the picture. The multicolored Strategic Air Command patch on his left shoulder was almost superfluous, for this man was obviously born to serve SAC or some equally dramatic and high-powered organization. A little too cool, a little too taut, a little too ruthless to be the All-American Boy, he radiated a command quality that promised he wouldn’t remain a lieutenant very long.

  “Keep it down to thirty,” he said to the driver in a voice that was used to giving orders.

  The road was wet.

  The launch site was near.

  It would be stupid to take any unnecessary chances of an accident now.

  All this was implicit in his voice. The husky African American behind the wheel nodded, clearly as accustomed to taking orders as the officer was to giving them. Both trained veterans, they understood each other well. For the next dozen seconds, the only sound was the hum of the motor and the annoyingly relentless squish-squish-squish of the mindless wipers. Then the perfect-featured lieutenant spoke again.

  “Mind if I turn on the radio, sir?” he asked crisply.

  The chunky sweating man in the captain’s uniform didn’t bother to reply. He merely reached forward to the dashboard, flicked a switch and settled back with a sigh. He was not a talkative person, and the perspiration generated by the tight coveralls and the station wagon’s heater and the humidity made him even less conversational than usual. He was not happy. The look on his pudgy face and his heavy complaining breathing confirmed that he was not happy.

  The small speaker in the dashboard suddenly came alive.

  “For the whitest wash of all!” the announcer’s voice promised in the synthetically intimate cadences of every well-read commercial. Next there sounded three chimes, followed immediately by the staccato clatter of teletype machines.

  “Eight A.M. and here is the news—the big news from the big station, KMOX—the Great Voice of Great Falls,” the broadcaster recited briskly. “With the election only twelve days away, the Harris Poll reports that President Stevens now holds only a two-point lead over Senator Baylor Caldwell in the race for the White House. Some fifty-one percent of the voters currently support the Chief Executive for re-election and forty-nine percent favor the colorful senior Senator from California, whose blistering attacks on the Administration’s defense policies and social-welfare programs have made this one of the bitterest campaigns in recent U.S. history. Caldwell has gained six points in the past month, and political experts now give him a fifty-fifty chance to win on November fourth. Both candidates were on the campaign trail yesterday, President Stevens speaking in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle and Senator Caldwell wooing voters in Miami, Atlanta and New Orleans. The rivals will meet in Washington on Wednesday night for the third and final broadcast in their series of nationally televised debates…Closer to home, State police are expanding the manhunt for the five convicts who escaped from Helena penitentiary late last night. The fugitives—all condemned murderers—broke out of the Death House shortly after midnight, seized Assistant Warden Patrick Claiborne as hostage and used him as a human shield to force the tower guards to open the main gate. Taking advantage of the heavy fog, they drove out in Claiborne’s black 1967 Chrysler sedan and have apparently by-passed or slipped through the first set of police roadblocks.”

  Blank-faced, the damp beefy captain stared ahead into the mist as if he hadn’t heard a single word of the sensational account crackling from the radio two feet away.

  “The fugitives are now heavily armed. While they had only two revolvers when they escaped, they are now equipped with submachine guns, bulletproof vests, tear-gas grenades and respirators,” warned the announcer in tones that communicated both awe and a certain professional excitement—if not glee. This was the biggest local news in two years, perhaps three. “Less than an hour ago, Governor Wilcox announced that the killers had seized this material in a three-A.M. raid on the police station in the town of Millegan—some one hundred thirty-eight miles north of the penitentiary. The governor has advised that these five desperate criminals—wife-killer Lawrence Dell, underworld assassin Jimmy ‘Stud’ Falco, sex slayer Harvey Schonbacher, religious fanatic Marvin ‘Deacon’ Hoxey and barroom brawler Willieboy Powell—are extremely dangerous.”

  The station-wagon driver suppressed a yawn that was bred of fatigue, not boredom. Desperate criminals? Escaped murderers? Of course, he was interested.

  “Citizens with any information as to the fugitives’ whereabouts should immediately notify local police and should not—repeat, not—attempt to stop them alone,” warned the Great Voice of Great Falls. “Falco alone is believed responsible for sixteen deaths, paid underworld executions, spread across seven states. Bad weather has hampered the manhunt thus far, but when skies clear this afternoon helicopters and state-police cars are expected to—”

  The porky captain clicked off the radio irritably, lit a cigarette to console himself. The lieutenant simply shook his movie-star head twice.

  “Those cons sound like a real mean crowd,” he said.

  “I certainly wouldn’t try to stop that bunch,” agreed the sergeant.

  “That’s not our job. It’s up to the police to—”

  “How far is it?” the chunky man in the middle interrupted impatiently.

  “Less than a mile, sir. I’ve been out here so many times that I could find Viper Three in my sleep,” the junior officer assured him cheerfully.

  Directly ahead there was a break in the fog.

  “The fence,” the driver announced.

  Running parallel to the left side of the highway was a five-strand barrier of barbed wire, nine feet high and connected to the central alarm system that protects each such U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile launch site. Somewhere within that fence and some sixty feet underground was the massive blast-proof, radiation-proof, bacteria-and-gas-proof steel and concrete “command capsule” that housed the controls of the launch site designated Viper Three. The two U.S. Air Force missile specialists—there were always two down in “the Hole”—who sat at Viper Three’s complex consoles controlled ten Minuteman rockets, each weapon with a range of 6,500 miles and a nuclear warhead that could incinerate a city of 1,000,000 people. There were eight identical Viper launch sites spread out over—no, under—many square miles of these Montana prairies, scientifically dispersed to assure the survival of the 168th Strategic Missile Wing’s eighty Minutemen. The responsibility of and pressure on the men in each “hole”—in Viper Three and the others—was tremendous, and standard Strategic Air Command procedures called for the Missile Combat Crew of each subterranean capsule to be changed every twenty-four hours.

  The armed Air Police who protected the launch site entrance and the cooks who manned Viper Three’s kitchen in the surface guardhouse were not quite so lucky. Their work was less demanding, their shifts three times as long. Their responsibility was also substantial—as they were often reminded—but somehow less glamorous and urgent, and the routines for protecting the entrance to “the Hole” had inevitably become boring after nineteen months. Even the surprise “no warning” security drills and occasional mock attacks no longer helped much in the struggle against tedium atop the rocket base code-named Viper Three, so the earnest, well-trained guards fingered their carbines and drank their coffee patiently but without any traces of either passion or enthusiasm. They had been waiting a long time for a crisis—a moment of glory—that they knew would probably never come, so this foggy morning when they heard the familiar and expected toot-toot of the station-wagon horn at the gate the Air Police at Viper Three responded quickly but unemotionally.

  In the sparely furnished but inexorably overheated guard room, a lanky Memphis-bred sergeant put down his cup and glanced at the round electric clock on the wall.

  “Oh-eight-oh-six, eight minutes late. Not too bad
for a dirty Sunday morning,” he said philosophically as he reached for his waterproof poncho. The gung-ho efficiency-expert types at Wing wouldn’t like this, of course, for they expected absolute on-time perfection. The sergeant rechecked the names on the list on his clipboard again. He’d studied the replacement schedule a dozen times during the previous hour, but SAC training had programmed him to take no chances. There was an inflexible, approved, safe routine for handling these shifts in Missile Combat Crews, and examining the names and credentials of the replacement duo was Step One in the official security regulations.

  “Kincaid, Roger F., Captain…Witkin, Harry O., First Lieutenant. Right, Sarge?” a swarthy young corporal joked from across the drab room.

  “Nobody likes a smart-ass, Mendez. Just do your job and remember that,” the Southern senior NCO reproved mechanically. The names quoted aloud had matched those on the list, but SAC Minuteman security procedures were certainly no subject for humor.

  A third Air Policeman—as husky and practical as the son of a West Virginia miner should be—watched as the other two donned their rain gear, checked the safeties on their carbines and slogged out into the foggy drizzle. They trudged the forty yards to the gate in silence, each completely familiar with what he had to do. This low-visibility weather complicated matters a bit, for the sergeant usually required the newly arrived replacement crew to line up outside the electrified fence so he could study their identification badges and photos before he unlocked the gate. In this fog, the senior NCO would have to go outside to check them off in the station wagon. Corporal Mendez would remain about a dozen yards back, covering the replacements warily with his finger on the trigger and the carbine set on “automatic.”

  It was all specified in the manual.

  The procedures had been developed and approved by both SAC headquarters outside Omaha and the meticulous security experts of the Defense Atomic Support Agency in Washington, the Pentagon’s little-known custodians of U.S. atomic and hydrogen warheads.

  As the long-jawed sergeant reached to unlock the gate, he heard a door of the nearby vehicle open and he knew exactly what to do. He barked an immediate order into the blinding mist.

  “Stay in the wagon—sir,” he snapped impatiently.

  He said “sir” because he knew that both members of the replacement crew were commissioned officers. Sergeant Russell didn’t know where Viper Three’s ten intercontinental ballistic missiles would land if fired, but he knew that only carefully screened, well-trained, emotionally stable officers were assigned to SAC Missile Combat Crews.

  Sergeant Bruce V. Russell flicked the switch, swung the barrier open and strode forward through the puddles and fog until he could peer into the wagon’s rolled-down window beside the driver. He looked in, saw the familiar white coveralls with the gold scarves and blinked in automatic approval of the hexagonal green badge that each missileman wore clipped over his heart. Then he thrust his flashlight and head inside to study the identification photos on the security badges, paused for a moment to test the replacements with the day’s coded “challenge.”

  “Daniel?” he queried.

  “Webster,” the pudgy captain replied correctly.

  No sweat, no problem—as usual. The lanky AP leaned in to complete the final check of faces against badge pictures, ignoring the black driver to get a better look at the officers who would actually enter Viper Three.

  “Now,” the handsome lieutenant whispered.

  The two big hands resting on the wheel suddenly leaped and closed like some radio-controlled vise around the Air Policeman’s throat, choking off his cry before a single sound emerged. The numbing shock of the attack caused the carbine to slip from Russell’s fingers, and the flashlight was jerked from his other hand by the beefy man wearing captain’s insignia. It was all happening very swiftly and crazily, unlike anything in any SAC manual. The driver squeezed harder and harder, ignoring the agonized terror in the sergeant’s astonished eyes. After a while, it was clear that the guard was unconscious and the husky chauffeur relaxed his grip.

  “Kill him! Finish him off!” urged the sweaty man in the middle.

  “What for?” the driver challenged scornfully. “What the hell are we, Apaches collecting scalps?”

  Willieboy had a gift for language, the lieutenant thought, but he didn’t say so. Nobody in the station wagon bothered to answer the chauffeur’s bitter question, for there was still a great deal to be done—and very little time.

  3

  Some sixteen yards away, Corporal Rafael Mendez was peering earnestly—and uncomfortably—into the wall of fog and wondering what was delaying the sergeant. Mendez detested these cold Montana mists, so different from the sensible man-warming weather of his native Arizona. Shivering and grumbling and cursing softly in savage sibilant Spanish, he didn’t hear the two barefoot men who had slipped out of the back of the blue wagon. He had no way of guessing that they were circling him in the gray cotton-candy mist. Mendez heard a sound of metal striking something—it was the carbine—and wondered. Finally the uneasy young corporal walked toward the station wagon, advancing slowly until he could make out the sergeant leaning into the open window to talk to the driver. But there was no sound of voices, no movement.

  Nothing seemed to be happening, and after several seconds the corporal began to wonder why. He took one step forward. At that instant, he was struck a stunning blow on the back of the neck. He was dazed as he crumpled to his knees; he could barely see the two pairs of oddly naked feet move nearer. Then gun butts smashed at his head from either side—twice—and Rafael Mendez sprawled on the concrete like one of those ruined rabbits whose corpses litter the sides of busy highways.

  The purposeful men who had fractured his skull did not loiter. One rolled the corporal’s body into a drainage ditch while the other picked up the dying man’s carbine. Next they edged toward the station wagon cautiously, taut and wary until they saw that the sergeant’s body hung limp—according to Dell’s plan. The taller of the two barefoot men tapped on the door frame with the muzzle of his submachine gun. Then the driver released his hold, and the unconscious Air Police sergeant collapsed beside the vehicle as if someone had let the air out of him.

  “Deacon and I cooled the other one,” the olive-skinned man with the machine gun reported to his confederates inside the station wagon. “Stud” Falco spoke quickly but calmly, as was befitting a man of his profession who had a good deal of experience with violence. There were few people in the United States—aside from a number of television producers and script writers for “Western” films—who had more experience with violence than this veteran assassin.

  “Good,” approved the handsome raider in the lieutenant’s coveralls as if he were running down a check list—which he was. “Tie him up, and let’s get on to Phase Two,” Dell continued in that voice so used to giving orders.

  It was Lawrence Dell—the one whom the Great Voice of Great Falls had so glibly summarized as wife-killer—who’d planned the operation with military precision. It was Dell who’d conceived the prison break, who’d passed the word to each of them furtively during a month of brief whispered talks in the exercise yard, who’d made them wait for this weather, who’d briefed them again on the details after they’d seized the station wagon. It was Dell who commanded this strange “strike force,” whose knowledge, boldness and cunning were their only hope. Aware of this reality, Falco moved swiftly and it took him only a minute to truss up the unconscious sergeant with the NCO’s own belt.

  “Finished, Larry. Lead on, Major Dell,” said the underworld executioner.

  “It is the Lord’s will,” the thin, pale maniac standing beside Falco in the mist chimed in piously.

  Dell couldn’t see his face clearly in the fog, but he knew the look that Marvin Hoxey was wearing. Marvin “Deacon” Hoxey—who’d helped Falco assault the young corporal a minute earlier—was a lunatic. He was clearly insane to almost anyone, anyone but a jury of angry Montana farmers and ranchers. Lawr
ence Dell realized that Hoxey was a grotesque religious fanatic, but the Plan—his plan—would need every man and gun if this extraordinary gamble were to succeed. This pious psychopath was a remarkably accurate shot, as he’d proved in slaying three of the deputies who’d come to arrest him for the church burnings, and he could be useful. Of course, it would take considerable luck and plenty of careful handling to keep this volatile madman in line—focussed and obedient to orders and the requirements of the Plan.

  “You’re right, it is the Lord’s will,” Dell reassured the gaunt lunatic smoothly. “You’re right, Deacon. We’re going in now, so would you please cover the back door?”

  Moving carefully and quietly, the five fugitives fanned out through the dense, dim drizzle as Dell had rehearsed them. Some forty seconds later, the third Air Policeman of Viper Three’s security team heard someone at the crew door of the prefabricated guardhouse. The rangy AP swiveled in his chair, his hands coming to rest—lightly—on the carbine on the desk before him. The crew door swung open, letting in a gust of rain and one of the replacements. The new combat crewman—a tall lieutenant in the familiar white coveralls—backed in still talking over his shoulder.

  “Hope you’ve got some hot coffee ready, Sergeant,” he said to someone behind him in the mist.

  It was so completely normal and routine that the AP relaxed for a second.

  That was all it took.

  The man in the coveralls turned around—and there was a .38-caliber Police Special revolver in his right fist. It pointed directly at the seated guard. For a moment, the blinking Air Policeman wondered whether this was some new test or perhaps a jest. Then he recognized the face of the invader in the lieutenant’s coveralls.

  “Major Dell,” identified the startled sentry.

  “Who’ll shoot you dead if your sweaty fingers move one half inch closer to that alarm buzzer,” answered the former Deputy Intelligence Officer of the 168th.