Twilight's Last Gleaming Read online

  5

  “Balls of brass,” Falco complimented a second after Dell had flicked the intercom switch.

  “Nice work, Major,” agreed the black Vietnam veteran.

  His voice was much calmer and less enthusiastic than Falco’s, for he was merely expressing one professional’s opinion of another. Willieboy Powell wasn’t giving compliments or anything else away.

  Schonbacher’s uneasy eyes swung back and forth, flashing out the fear still within him like some electric sign. There was an utterly different look on Hoxey’s face, tranquil beatitude.

  “Lord’s will,” he sighed.

  Dell nodded.

  “I’m sure it was,” he replied, “but that calendar on the wall helped too.”

  “You weren’t just guessing?” probed Falco.

  “Not after I saw the calendar. Once I checked the calendar and made sure this was the start of the third week of the month, I knew I had him cold. SAC sometimes uses three-part passwords, but only in the first half of any month. Don’t ask me why; some security genius made the rule a few years ago.”

  Then he held up his right hand, showing four fingers.

  “Four minutes!” he said in the confident, driving tones of a football coach giving a half-time pep talk to a team that was already twenty points ahead. “Four minutes—two hundred and forty seconds, and we’re home. Once we’re inside and I’ve fixed the wiring, it’s the whole damn ball game!”

  The generals—all those cold, busy men with the stars and the power who spoke so authoritatively to Senate committees and television cameras—would never believe it. Of course a hydrogen bomb could be lost off Spain and nerve gas could accidentally kill 6,000 sheep in Utah, but nobody could ever seize a Minuteman capsule.

  “We’ll be safe inside,” Dell promised.

  The others looked at him hopefully, wondered.

  “What’s it really like inside?” Schonbacher tested.

  “Marvelous. No air pollution, no crowds, no noise problem, no annoying door-to-door salesmen, no junk mail, no screaming demonstrators and no burglars or muggers. It’s even germ-free. Law and order, U.S.A., and clean as Doris Day’s undies—the American dream come true.”

  “But no broads,” Falco observed.

  “When they make the picture, they’ll put in a few broads,” Powell assured him.

  It was an attractive prospect.

  “I want Dean Martin to play me,” Falco stipulated.

  “You’ve got a deal,” pledged the black man.

  “Look at it this way, Stud,” reasoned the ex-SAC officer wryly. “No broads—but no police and no roadblocks and no helicopters hunting you down like an animal. It’s a perfect hideout, but even if it wasn’t we’ve got no place else to hole up out here in these goddam prairies anyway.”

  Powell sighed.

  “It should be quiet and restful anyway,” he judged, “and that’ll be good because I’m tired—tired of sweating and tired of running.”

  “I give you my word as an ex-officer and a former gentleman,” Dell vowed, “that once we bolt that eight-ton door behind us the running is over. And the sweating too. As soon as I disconnect those cutoffs and make that phone call, they’ll do the sweating. The fat men at the top, the men so high up they never heard of us and wouldn’t care if they did!”

  He spoke with the special bitterness of a man who’d been on the way to the top himself, who’d been part of the Establishment and had been expelled-betrayed-abandoned by it. Hoxey was speaking too, or at least his thin lips were moving in what was probably some righteous prayer. There was something ironically incongruous in this, Dell reflected, for the madman was in almost continuous communication with his God but the sane people—the respectable sensible jurors who’d voted to end his life—were content to relate to their deity only one day a week. Sunday—this was Sunday, when they put on clean clothes and prayed for lower taxes and an end to student riots. The “impossible” assault on Pearl Harbor had also been on a Sunday, Dell recalled.

  No more time.

  “Let’s go,” he ordered.

  They followed him past the open door of the closet in which the bound cooks lay watching, with Falco winking at the captives and Deacon Hoxey making an awkward sign of the cross with his carbine. Powell didn’t do anything so colorful; he simply closed the closet door. The convicts followed Dell through another door that led from the guardroom into a corridor, down that passage and around the corner where they faced the accordion gate of a typical freight elevator. It was smaller than most, and the five invaders found themselves crowded uncomfortably when Dell closed the metal grid behind them.

  Down.

  Slowly.

  As the elevator began to descend, the former Air Force intelligence officer automatically glanced at his watch again to check the time, as SAC had trained him to. This part of the holy ritual—like the others—presumably contained some special magic of its own, and—like the elaborate security system for the launch sites—was designed to produce perfect results for imperfect men.

  Flawed men—such as these in this elevator, he reflected.

  Perhaps not quite that flawed, but men who could take orders or lives or flight as the situation required.

  0818.

  Two minutes to go.

  When the elevator stopped at the bottom of the shaft, Dell guided the raiders out into a well-lit room lined with green metal lockers, a door and a large cork bulletin board that was almost completely covered with mimeographed copies of recent “standing orders” from Wing headquarters. There was also a SAC poster reminding and re-emphasizing and repeating the need to maintain the tightest security at missile bases, to keep the secrets of America’s ICBM weapons and installations from…It didn’t say from whom, but you couldn’t put that on a poster anyway because the nation’s—any nation’s—enemies changed from year to year. Now the Germans and the Japanese were our friends and the Russians and the Chinese were our foes, and the Apaches were no longer the villains in film and fiction and young people from the best families shouted obscenities at policemen instead of playing tennis. None of the convicts said any of these things, of course, or anything else. They simply looked around curiously and silently, waiting for Lawrence Dell to do what he had to do next.

  He pointed to the gray telephone on the wall, walked to it and raised the receiver.

  “Kincaid and Witkin ready to enter Launch Control Center,” he told the men inside the capsule. “One hundred and twenty seconds? Roger. We’re standing by at the hatch.”

  As he hung up the phone, the convicts all turned to face the door at the far end of the room. It looked like a ship’s hatch, but the rectangular metal plate was actually an eight-ton slab of torchproof steel. It was made of the same material used in the exterior walls of bank vaults, a choice based on the fact that something much more valuable than Xerox shares or diamonds or tax-free municipal bonds was stored here. Something so precious and potent as to be priceless rested inside, ten small red switches and two unique keys worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox or the rerun rights to every TV situation-comedy series ever made. They were invaluable, but nevertheless no one could steal them or sell them, for they were valueless outside of this subterranean redoubt.

  0819.

  Sixty seconds.

  “Our one chance,” Dell warned. “Harvey and I will go in first—in the coveralls. Stud, you and Willieboy will stand by with the tear gas. Deacon, cover the elevator behind us—and say another prayer.”

  They heard the clicking sounds of the heavy bolts being retracted, and the big metal door swung out smoothly on well-oiled hinges. Framed in the opening stood First Lieutenant Philip Canellis, a thin, twenty-eight-year-old Bostonian in the standard white coveralls with the standard .38-caliber pistol on his right hip. With no reason to expect trouble, he’d left the gun in its leather sling when he’d unlocked and opened the four-foot-thick door. He saw “Captain” Harvey Schonbacher, blinked at the unfamiliar face. If he’d seen Dell,
the face wouldn’t have been unfamiliar and he wouldn’t have blinked. He’d have grabbed for his side arm and shouted “Red Indian!”

  But he didn’t see Dell.

  Dell was hiding, just out of sight on the left side of the opening.

  He was hiding and waiting, with one of the stolen police revolvers in his right hand.

  As soon as Canellis blinked, Schonbacher nodded in the prearranged signal and the former major stepped forward. He swung the gun at the same time. The lieutenant recognized him instantly, reached for his own weapon and opened his mouth to scream “Red Indian!” At that moment, Lawrence Dell hit him. First he struck Canellis in the mouth with the revolver, and some one and a half seconds later hit him in the throat with some sort of judo blow. The attack was brutal, barbarous, unprovoked, deplorable and successful. The missile officer fell to his knees, and when Dell struck him twice more on the back of the head he sprawled on the floor—full length, face down, unconscious.

  Phase Three was going well.

  Not a shot, not a shout to sound the alarm.

  Some thirty feet down the tunnel in the Control Center itself, a tall blond captain seated in a swivel chair faced a large console covered with dials, switches and gauges. There was also a red alarm buttom, isolated on the panel so that it wouldn’t be pressed by accident. Dell couldn’t see the button at this distance, but he knew exactly where it was and what would happen if the commander of this Missile Combat Crew pushed it.

  Everything, and the Plan would fail.

  They would have the hole but not the birds, and without the birds Viper Three would be a trap instead of a weapon. The birds—the ten ICBMs—were crucial.

  Dell pointed to Falco’s submachine gun, and the underworld assassin handed him the weapon unquestioningly. Then Dell pointed to Schonbacher, gesturing a command to precede him up the passage. The sweaty-faced rapist winced, hesitated and finally swallowed nervously. None of those things would have mattered if he’d moved up the tunnel, for Dell wanted someone else—someone whose face wouldn’t trigger the crew commander into hitting that red button—to be point man. But Schonbacher didn’t move. Son of a bitch, Dell thought angrily. Son of a bitch, the son of a bitch was a coward as well as a sex murderer.

  Schonbacher had to go first—and now.

  Right now, or the captain at the console would wonder.

  Schonbacher had to go first because he was the only other raider in white coveralls.

  Dell had to decide instantly between the carrot and the stick, the reassuring words or the machine gun in the belly. He guessed that force or even the threat of force might panic Schonbacher, so he smiled confidently and leaned close.

  “We’ve got it made, Harve,” the former major lied in a confidential whisper. “Just amble up the shaft—it’s only fifteen or twenty steps—and screen me until I can cover the man at the console.”

  Schonbacher swallowed again, took a deep breath and started walking slowly. Dell followed, holding the machine gun behind Schonbacher so the crew commander wouldn’t see it. This weapon wasn’t standard equipment for missilemen, and everything had to look routine and standard—for another fifteen seconds. They were that close to success. As Schonbacher approached, the yellow-haired crew commander—Captain Sanford Towne—smiled and spoke.

  “You guys are late. Fog again, huh?” he said as he rose from the swivel chair.

  Schonbacher wondered what to answer, a dilemma that ended swiftly.

  Dell pushed him aside.

  “Don’t move, Sandy,” he ordered. “One step and you’re dead.”

  One step. Towne was one step from the instrument panel and its red button. He looked at the machine gun, the man who aimed it and the distance to the red button. One step.

  “You’d never make it.” Dell warned, reading his thoughts. “You’d be dog meat before you got halfway.”

  Towne took a deep breath, tensing as if to move.

  “Don’t try it, Sandy. This gun throws six hundred slugs a minute, and they go a lot faster than you do. I’ll put ten holes in you before you can blink.”

  The crew commander’s eyes flickered, shifted toward the tunnel.

  “No, he isn’t coming. We took him at the door,” Dell replied to the unspoken hope.

  Now Powell and Falco—the latter still in prison uniform—appeared in the doorway, each carrying a gun and each pointing it at Captain Sanford Towne. Dell couldn’t see them, but the look on the crew commander’s face told him that they were there.

  “Willie? Stud?” the ex-major tested.

  “We’re here.”

  The odds were hopeless.

  Towne sighed, raised his hands slowly in surrender.

  “Good, very good. Very intelligent,” Dell complimented. “Now take three steps away from the console—three very careful steps, Sandy, or you’ll be dead.”

  “Larry,” the crew commander began.

  “No, no talk. Move.”

  Towne obeyed.

  “Take his gun, Stud.”

  The professional assassin advanced, disarmed the missileman and glanced at the pistol in his hand. He nodded—as if remembering something—and abruptly hit Towne on the back of the head with the gun. The crew commander dropped to the gray linoleum floor.

  “Sometimes guys get second thoughts,” Falco explained calmly, “and we don’t have time to screw around with heroes.”

  Falco was right. Towne might have made another try. Neither Dean Martin nor John Wayne would have slugged an unarmed man like this, but they had their images to consider. One of the rare Americans who didn’t care about being popular, Falco was thinking solely of his own survival. He did this with the knowledge that no one else was.

  “Okay, chain him up,” Dell said after one long glance at the man on the floor. “Stud, would you help Harvey?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Willieboy, come with me.”

  Powell followed him back down the short tunnel toward the door, stopped to look down at the young lieutenant whose bruised cut mouth was now bleeding.

  “He’s still out,” the ex-Marine reported.

  Dell nodded, called to Hoxey to enter. The madman walked inside and was studying the dimly lit shaft as Dell and Powell put down their machine guns. He watched as they leaned against the massive portal, saw it move slowly and close with a jarring crash of metal against metal. Then the handsome hard man who’d once been Major Lawrence Dell slammed shut the two-inch steel bolts and spun the wheel that locked out the rest of the world.

  0824.

  Phase Three completed.

  They had achieved the impossible.

  Now only the unbelievable lay between them and a fantastic victory.

  6

  Cunning, check.

  Violence, check.

  The cunning and violence were finished, but—from a technical point of view—the most difficult part of the operation still lay ahead.

  Directly ahead, to be precise, and Dell knew that he had to be perfectly precise. It was now a question of seconds and millimeters, he thought as he noticed Hoxey staring dreamily up the tunnel toward the brightly lit Launch Control Center. The sharp-featured Arkansan had never seen anything like this, of course, and he was studying it with the curiosity of a sly, hostile child. He was wholly absorbed, indifferent to the mounting menace of time.

  “Wake up, Deacon,” Dell ordered in tones of barely controlled irritation. “Deacon, we’re in a critical bind—a time bind. Somebody might find the real missile crew on the surface at any moment, so there’s no time for sightseeing now. There’s too much to be done.”

  “Can I help, Larry?” the madman asked politely.

  Dell nodded.

  “Help Willie move this fellow off the floor and get him up to the Control Center—up there. Harvey and Stud will tie him up,” the former major promised.

  Dell glanced at his wristwatch as Hoxey and Powell lifted the unconscious lieutenant. Numbers, it was all numbers now just as it had been in the Air
Force. Viper Three controlled ten Minutemen, but four other Viper launch sites within sixty miles also had some control—a negative control—over these same missiles. If any one of the eight alert men in the other four capsules saw an alarm light blinking to signal that Viper Three was preparing to fire its rockets, he could flick an “inhibitor” switch that would make any such launching impossible. There was a cable linking each other Viper capsule to the main instrument control console here in Three, and these wires permitted SAC teams outside Viper Three to cancel Three’s effectiveness as a weapon. Dell had to find and remove these cutoff devices without setting off any of the sensitive and tricky anti-sabotage alarms or booby traps. Some worked by pressure plate, others by trigger, still others by tension or electric circuit. A number were cleverly disguised.

  Dell had to disconnect or neutralize all of them.

  Then he’d make the phone call, the one he’d been planning so bitterly during the long weeks in the Death House. He’d worked out every word, for this would be an important—perhaps historic—conversation. He had no doubt about what he’d say, and the only question was whether he still remembered the complete wiring diagrams he’d last seen in the TOP SECRET “security maintenance manual” nearly a year earlier.

  He started up the shaft after Powell and Hoxey, stopped half-way to the Control Center to open a four-foot-high gray metal locker standing against the tunnel wall. He pulled out a toolbox stenciled USAF EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE, hefted it and walked quickly to the command capsule itself. Falco, Hoxey and Schonbacher were finishing the binding of the two unconscious Air Force officers, but Willieboy Powell stood aside cradling his machine gun and watching.

  “Hurry up, dammit,” Dell commanded. “Aren’t you finished yet?”

  Schonbacher turned, sniffed defensively.

  “Almost,” Falco answered pleasantly. “Just about…yeah, that’s it.”

  He stepped back, inspected and approved.

  “Finished, Larry,” he said.

  “Dump them both in the bunks—over there—and clear out. Back into the tunnel—all of you,” Dell instruted curtly. “This is going to be damned delicate, and I don’t want anybody breathing down my neck.”