Deserts of Fire Read online

  “And SAC drops an A-bomb as the showstopper?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I saw one of those shows,” I said. “My kids were watching it. I got the strangest feeling … I almost wanted that red telephone to ring… .”

  “I know what you mean,” the Under Secretary said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that whoever’s behind this has gotten caught up in the hysteria themselves … that the Horsemen are now using whoever was using them … a closed circle. But I’ve been tired lately. The war’s making us all so tired. If only we could get it all over with …”

  “We’d all like to get it over with one way or the other,” I said.

  T minus 60 minutes … and counting… .

  I had orders to muster Backfish’s crew for the live satellite relay on “The Four Horsemen’s Fourth.” Superficially, it might seem strange to order the whole Polaris fleet to watch a television show, but the morale factor involved was quite significant.

  Polaris subs are frustrating duty. Only top sailors are chosen and a good sailor craves action. Yet if we are ever called upon to act, our mission will have been a failure. We spend most of our time honing skills that must never be used. Deterrence is a sound strategy but a terrible drain on the men of the deterrent forces—a drain exacerbated in the past by the negative attitude of our countrymen toward our mission. Men who, in the service of their country, polish their skills to a razor edge and then must refrain from exercising them have a right to resent being treated as pariahs.

  Therefore the positive change in the public attitude toward us that seems to be associated with the Four Horsemen has made them mascots of a kind to the Polaris fleet. In their strange way they seem to speak for us and to us.

  I chose to watch the show in the missile control center, where a full crew must always be ready to launch the missiles on five-minute notice. I have always felt a sense of communion with the duty watch in the missile control center that I cannot share with the other men under my command. Here we are not captain and crew, but mind and hand. Should the order come, the will to fire the missiles will be mine and the act will be theirs. At such a moment, it will be good not to feel alone.

  All eyes were on the television set mounted above the main console as the show came on and …

  The screen was filled with a whirling spiral pattern, metallic yellow on metallic blue. There was a droning sound that seemed part sitar and part electronic and I had the feeling that the sound was somehow coming from inside my head and the spiral seemed etched directly on my retinas. It hurt mildly, yet nothing in the world could have made me turn away.

  Then came two voices, chanting against each other:

  “Let it all come in …”

  “Let it all come out …”

  “In … out … in … out … in … out …”

  My head seemed to be pulsing—in-out, in-out, in-out—and the spiral pattern began to pulse color changes with the words: yellow-on-blue (in) … green-on-red (out) … in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out …

  In the screen … out my head … I seemed to be beating against some kind of invisible membrane between myself and the screen as if something were trying to embrace my mind and I were fighting it…. But why was I fighting it?

  The pulsing, the chanting, got faster and faster till in could not be told from out and negative spiral after-images formed in my eyes faster than they could adjust to the changes, piled up on each other faster and faster till it seemed my head would explode—

  The chanting and the droning broke and there were the Four Horsemen, in their robes, playing on some stage against a backdrop of clear blue sky. And a single voice, soothing now: “You are in …”

  Then the view was directly above the Horsemen and I could see that they were on some kind of circular platform. The view moved slowly and smoothly up and away and I saw that the circular stage was atop a tall tower; around the tower and completely encircling it was a huge crowd seated on desert sands that stretched away to an empty infinity.

  “And we are in and they are in …”

  I was down among the crowd now; they seemed to melt and flow like plastic, pouring from the television screen to enfold me… .

  “And we are all in here together… .”

  A strange and beautiful feeling … the music got faster and wilder, ecstatic … the hull of the Backfish seemed unreal … the crowd was swaying to it around me … the distance between myself and the crowd seemed to dissolve … I was there … they were here…. We were transfixed …

  “Oh, yeah, we are all in here together … together …”

  T minus 45 minutes … and counting… .

  Jeremy and I sat staring at the television screen, ignoring each other and everything around us. Even with the short watches and the short tours of duty, you can get to feeling pretty strange down here in a hole in the ground under tons of concrete, just you and the guy with the other key, with nothing to do but think dark thoughts and get on each other’s nerves. We’re all supposed to be as stable as men can be, or so they tell us, and they must be right because the world’s still here. I mean, it wouldn’t take much—just two guys on the same watch over the same three Minutemen flipping out at the same time, turning their keys in the dual lock, pressing the three buttons…. Pow! World War III!

  A bad thought, the kind we’re not supposd to think or I’ll start watching Jeremy and he’ll start watching me and we’ll get a paranoia feedback going…. But that can’t happen; we’re too stable, too responsible. As long as we remember that it’s healthy to feel a little spooky down here, we’ll be all right.

  But the television set is a good idea. It keeps us in contact with the outside world, keeps it real. It’d be too easy to start thinking that the missile control center down here is the only real world and that nothing that happens up there really matters…. Bad thought!

  The Four Horsemen … somehow these guys help you get it all out. I mean that feeling that it might be better to release all that tension, get it all over with. Watching the Four Horsemen, you’re able to go with it without doing any harm, let it wash over you and then through you. I suppose they are crazy; they’re all the human craziness in ourselves that we’ve got to keep very careful watch over down here. Letting it all come out watching the Horsemen makes it surer that none of it will come out down here. I guess that’s why a lot of us have taken to wearing those “Do It” buttons off duty. The brass doesn’t mind; they seem to understand that it’s the kind of inside sick joke we need to keep us functioning.

  Now that spiral thing they had started the show with—and the droning—came back on. Zap! I was right back in the screen again, as if the commercial hadn’t happened.

  “We are all in here together …”

  And then a closeup of the lead singer, looking straight at me, as close as Jeremy and somehow more real. A mean-looking guy with something behind his eyes that told me he knew where everything lousy and rotten was at.

  A bass began to thrum behind him and some kind of electronic hum that set my teeth on edge. He began playing his guitar, mean and low-down. And singing in that kind of drop-dead tone of voice that starts brawls in bars:

  “I stabbed my mother and I mugged my paw …”

  A riff of heavy guitar chords echoed the words mockingly as a huge swastika (red-on-black, black-on-red) pulsed like a naked vein on the screen—

  The face of the Horseman, leering—

  “Nailed my sister to the toilet door …”

  Guitar behind the pulsing swastika—

  “Drowned a puppy in a cement machine…. Burned a kitten just to hear it scream… .”

  On the screen, just a big fire burning in slow-motion, and the voice became a slow, shrill, agonized wail:

  “Oh, God, I’ve got this red-hot fire burning in the marrow of my brain… .

  “Oh, yes, I got this fire burning … in the stinking marrow of my brain… .

  “Gotta get me a blowtorch … and set some naked flesh on flame …”
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  The fire dissolved into the face of a screaming Oriental woman, who ran through a burning village clawing at the napalm on her back.

  “I got this message … boiling in the bubbles of my blood…. A man ain’t nothing but a fire burning … in a dirty glob of mud… .”

  A film clip of a Nuremberg rally: a revolving swastika of marching men waving torches—

  Then the leader of the Horsemen superimposed over the twisted flaming cross:

  “Don’t you hate me baby, can’t you feel somethin’ screaming in your mind?

  “Don’t you hate me baby, feel me drowning you in slime!”

  Just the face of the Horseman howling hate—

  “Oh yes, I’m a monster, mother …”

  A long view of the crowd around the platform, on their feet, waving arms, screaming soundlessly. Then a quick zoom in and a kaleidoscope of faces, eyes feverish, mouths open and howling—

  “Just call me—”

  The face of the Horseman superimposed over the crazed faces of the crowd—

  “Mankind!”

  I looked at Jeremy. He was toying with the key on the chain around his neck. He was sweating. I suddenly realized that I was sweating, too, and that my own key was throbbing in my hand alive… .

  T minus 13 minutes … and counting… .

  A funny feeling, the captain watching the Four Horsemen here in the Backfish’s missile control center with us. Sitting in front of my console watching the television set with the captain kind of breathing down my neck. I got the feeling he knew what was going through me and I couldn’t know what was going through him … and it gave the fire inside me a kind of greasy feel I didn’t like… .

  Then the commercial was over and that spiral-thing came on again and—whoosh!—it sucked me right back into the television set and I stopped worrying about the captain or anything like that… .

  Just the spiral going yellow-blue, red-green, and then starting to whirl and whirl, faster and faster, changing colors and whirling, whirling, whirling… .

  And the sound of a kind of Coney Island carousel tinkling behind it, faster and faster and faster, whirling and whirling and whirling, flashing red-green, yellow-blue, and whirling, whirling, whirling …

  And this big hum filling my body and whirling, whirling, whirling … my muscles relaxing, going limp, whirling, whirling, whirling, all limp, whirling, whirling, whirling, oh so nice, just whirling, whirling …

  And in the center of the flashing spiraling colors, a bright dot of colorless light, right at the center, not moving, not changing, while the whole world went whirling and whirling in colors around it, and the humming was coming from the dot the way the carousel music was coming from the spinning colors and the dot was humming its song to me… .

  The dot was a light way down at the end of a long, whirling, whirling tunnel. The humming started to get a little louder. The bright dot started to get a little bigger. I was drifting down the tunnel toward it, whirling, whirling, whirling …

  T minus 11 minutes … and counting… .

  Whirling, whirling, whirling down a long, long tunnel of pulsing colors, whirling, whirling, toward the circle of light way down at the end of the tunnel…. How nice it would be to finally get there and soak up the beautiful hum filling my body and then I could forget that I was down here in this hole in the ground with a hard brass key in my hand, just Duke and me, down here in a cave under the ground that was a spiral of flashing colors, whirling, whirling toward the friendly light at the end of the tunnel, whirling, whirling …

  T minus 10 minutes … and counting… .

  The circle of light at the end of the whirling tunnel was getting bigger and bigger and the humming was getting louder and louder and I was feeling better and better and the Backfish’s missile control center was getting dimmer and dimmer as the awful weight of command got lighter and lighter, whirling, whirling, and I felt so good I wanted to cry, whirling, whirling …

  T minus 9 minutes … and counting… .

  Whirling, whirling … I was whirling, Jeremy was whirling, the hole in the ground was whirling, and the circle of light at the end of the tunnel whirled closer and closer and—I was through! A place filled with yellow light. Pale metal-yellow light. Then pale metallic blue. Yellow. Blue. Yellow. Blue. Yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow …

  Pure light pulsing … and pure sound droning. And just the feeling of letters I couldn’t read between the pulses-not-yellow and not-blue-too quick and too faint to be visible, but important, very important …

  And then came a voice that seemed to be singing from inside my head, almost as if it were my own:

  “Oh, oh, oh … don’t I really wanna know…. Oh, oh, oh … don’t I really wanna know …”

  The world pulsing, flashing around those words I couldn’t read, couldn’t quite read, had to read, could almost read …

  “Oh, oh, oh … great God, I really wanna know …”

  Strange amorphous shapes clouding the blue-yellow-blue flickering universe, hiding the words I had to read…. Damn it, why wouldn’t they get out of the way so I could find out what I had to know!

  “Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me…. Gotta know gotta know gotta know gotta know …”

  T minus 7 minutes … and counting… .

  Couldn’t read the words! Why wouldn’t the captain let me read the words? And that voice inside me: “Gotta know … gotta know … gotta know why it hurts me so… .” Why wouldn’t it shut up and let me read the words? Why wouldn’t it shut up and let me read the words? Why wouldn’t the words hold still? Or just slow down a little? If they’d slow down a little, I could read them and then I’d know what I had to do… .

  T minus 6 minutes … and counting… .

  I felt the sweaty key in the palm of my hand … I saw Duke stroking his own key. Had to know! Now—through the pulsing blue-yellow-blue light and the unreadable words that were building up an awful pressure in the back of my brain—I could see the Four Horsemen. They were on their knees, crying, looking up at something and begging: “Tell me tell me tell me tell me …”

  Then soft billows of rich red-and-orange fire filled the world and a huge voice was trying to speak. But it couldn’t form the words. It stuttered and moaned—

  The yellow-blue-yellow flashing around the words I couldn’t read-the same words, I suddenly sensed, that the voice of the fire was trying so hard to form-and the Four Horsemen on their knees begging: “Tell me tell me tell me …”

  The friendly warm fire trying so hard to speak—

  “Tell me tell me tell me tell me …”

  T minus 4 minutes … and counting… .

  What were the words? What was the order? I could sense my men silently imploring me to tell them. After all, I was their captain, it was my duty to tell them. It was my duty to find out!

  “Tell me tell me tell me …” the robed figures on their knees implored through the flickering pulse in my brain and I could almost make out the words … almost …

  “Tell me tell me tell me …” I whispered to the warm orange fire that was trying so hard but couldn’t quite form the words. The men were whispering it, too: “Tell me tell me …”

  T minus 3 minutes … and counting… .

  The question burning blue and yellow in my brain: What was the fire trying to tell me? What were the words I couldn’t read?

  Had to unlock the words! Had to find the key! A key…. The Key? THE KEY! And there was the lock that imprisoned the words, right in front of me! Put the key in the lock…. I looked at Jeremy. Wasn’t there some reason, long ago and far away, why Jeremy might try to stop me from putting the key in the lock?

  But Jeremy didn’t move as I fitted the key into the lock… .

  T minus 2 minutes … and counting… .

  Why wouldn’t the captain tell me what the order was? The fire knew, but it couldn’t tell. My head ached from the pulsing, but I couldn’t read the words.

  “Tell me tell me tell me …�
�� I begged.

  Then I realized that the captain was asking, too.

  T minus 90 seconds … and counting… .

  “Tell me tell me tell me …” the Horsemen begged. And the words I couldn’t read were a fire in my brain.

  Duke’s key was in the lock in front of us. From very far away, he said: “We have to do it together.”

  Of course … our keys … our keys would unlock the words!

  I put my key into the lock. One, two, three, we turned our keys together. A lid on the console popped open. Under the lid were three red buttons. Three signs on the console lit up in red letters:

  ARMED.

  T minus 60 seconds … and counting… .

  The men were waiting for me to give some order. I didn’t know what the order was. A magnificent orange fire was trying to tell me but it couldn’t get the words out…. Robed figures were praying to the fire… .

  Then, through the yellow-blue flicker that hid the words I had to read, I saw a vast crowd encircling a tower. The crowd was on its feet begging silently—

  The tower in the center of the crowd became the orange fire that was trying to tell me what the words were—

  Became a great mushroom of billowing smoke and blinding orange-red glare… .

  T minus 30 seconds … and counting… .

  The huge pillar of fire was trying to tell Jeremy and me what the words were, what we had to do. The crowd was screaming at the cloud of flame. The yellow-blue flicker was getting faster and faster behind the mushroom cloud. I could almost read the words! I could see that there were two of them!

  T minus 20 seconds … and counting… .

  Why didn’t the captain tell us? I could almost see the words!

  Then I heard the crowd around the beautiful mushroom cloud shouting: “DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!”

  T minus 10 seconds … and counting… .

  “DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!”

  What did they want me to do? Did Duke know? The men were waiting! What was the order? They hunched over the firing controls, waiting…. The firing controls …?