Warren Murphy: Last War Dance

When he entered the gray trailer, the government supervisor stood to attention. "General Van Riker, sir," said the supervisor.

The white-haired man blew the chill from his fingertips. He nodded toward the safe, whose dial peeked out from under a bunk.

"Do you understand all that?" he asked.

"I've had time to study it, sir," said the supervisor.

General Van Riker looked to the quiet man who carried the gun. The man nodded.

"All right," said Van Riker, lowering himself lightly into a folding steel chair. "You know, we almost canceled during that bone incident. You should have prepared for the possibility of the bodies. I shouldn't have had to come here before I was supposed to."

The government supervisor raised his hands in a shrug. "For all the workmen know, this is an ordinary missile with an ordinary head. They were spooked by the bones, that's all. The crane-operator held a little funeral for one skull, I think, the day after you left."

"I know they think it's an ordinary ICBM. That's not the problem. I just don't want this to be the silo they remember. That's why I've sent them all over these prairies, digging more holes. Just to confuse them. But that's neither your worry nor your fault."

General Van Riker nodded to the safe again. "C'mon, we'll need that."

From the safe the supervisor brought two clipboards with notes and diagrams. General Van Riker recognized them immediately. He had written them. He had never commanded so much as an infantry platoon or a single airplane, but he had written those plans. And on the day he devised a two-man, two-day all-weather installation of an underground missile—as opposed to the usual method requiring multitudes and weeks and ideal conditions—he had been promoted to lieutenant general in the United States Air Force from a laboratory in an Atomic Energy Commission installation.

Before he had left his civilian post in the AEC lab, Van Riker had also designed something else—what one think-tank scientist called "the loser warhead" because "you use it when you lose one of two things: a world war or your sanity."

Now in this Montana prairie Van Riker was bringing both his theories together.

The supervisor donned his cold-weather gear, and with the clipboards under one arm, he joined General Van Riker and stepped out into the subzero winter night.

The quiet man who carried the gun watched the two go to the truck and back it up to the tarpaulin-covered silo. He turned off the light in the little trailer to let his eyes adjust to the darkness but all he saw was a large metal arm extending from the back of the van. A large, dark canopy seemed to glide slowly along what appeared to be a pulley device on the arm, finally stopping over the tarpaulin.

In the morning the quiet man saw that the dark canopy was a small air-filled workshed. Van Riker and the supervisor emerged only to grab a few hours sleep when darkness fell again. Then they went back to the canopy workshed.

On the second day when darkness fell again, General Van Riker returned to the trailer and said to the quiet man, "Go ahead. Do you want a drink first?"

"Not during work," the quiet man said.

"How about after?"

"I drink bourbon. Make it a double." The quiet man unholstered his .45 caliber automatic, checked the clip and the chamber, dry-fired it once, then returned it to its shoulder holster with the safety off.

"I know you drink bourbon," said Van Riker. "You drink a lot of it."

"Not when I'm dry."

"I know that, too. You have long periods of abstinence. You're very capable of it."

"Thank you," said the quiet man.

And Van Riker smiled his joy-of-fact smile, the same smile that came from knowing that the Montana prairie contained the bones of two massacres and that at twenty-five feet in this prairie the original bones must be about fifteen thousand years old.

Outside, the quiet man felt the chilling nip of the Montana winter night, felt the canopy of ice-clear stars above him, and crunched his way forward in moonlight so bright he could almost read in it.

"Oh" was all he said when he saw the site. Where the tarpaulin and then the workshed had been was now a huge block of marble five feet high and stretching almost fifty feet across. A giant block of statuary marble in the middle of a prairie. Rising about a foot and a half above it was something dark. He went to the marble, which came up to his chin, and saw that the something dark appeared to be a round brass cylinder.

"Up here," came the supervisor's voice. "I'm up here. General Van Riker said you're supposed to help."

When the quiet man hoisted himself up onto the block of marble, he saw that he was standing next to a giant bronze circle, which appeared to have raised letters.

It was a giant plaque. It felt funny to walk across the lettering. He had never walked on a plaque before, and he wondered absently whether the raised letters were cutting into the soles of his boots.

He motioned to the supervisor that he wanted the clipboards, then took them silently and clipped them securely to his belt.

"Van Riker said that when I gave you those clipboards, you would explain the reason for those two holes over there," said the supervisor, pointing to the other side of the marble base, where there were two dark holes, three feet in diameter, like mini-silos. "There's no reason in these plans for them, But General Van Riker said they were essential and that you'd tell me."

The quiet man nodded for the supervisor to accompany him across the plaque to the holes.

"Will you say something?" demanded the supervisor angrily. "Van Riker says you're going to give me an explanation. I told him it would be the first time I ever heard you talk. Now, talk."

The quiet man looked at the three-foot holes and then at the supervisor he had lived with for so long without looking, without talking, making an effort not to listen to anything more important than a request to pass the salt. He had even stolen the picture of the supervisor's family that had been on his desk because he did not wish to look at the three young boys and smiling woman. He had thrown the picture, frame and all, into the maximum-disposal bags that were burned at the site every day.

"There's a reason why I didn't talk to you all this time," said the quiet man. "I didn't want to get to know you."

He brought the .45 out of his shoulder holster and put the first bullet between the supervisor's eyes. The heavy slug sent the head snapping back, as if a baseball bat had collided with it. The body followed. The supervisor hit the plaque. The body twitched violently and then was still. The quiet man returned the gun to the holster but did not put on the safety catch.

He dragged the supervisor's feet over to one of the holes on the side of the marble monument, then dropped the feet over the edge. He grabbed the shoulders and pushed them toward the feet, and the supervisor's corpse slid down into the hole, his head only eighteen inches from the top of the bronze plaque, which looked like a giant blowup of a penny atop a match box.

When the quiet man reached for his .45 again, he felt the wetness of the handle and realized his hands were covered with blood. He knelt on the plaque and leaned down into the hole, the gun stretched out in front of him. When it touched the supervisor's head, he fired three times. The splattering bone fragments, brain, and blood gushed up into the quiet man's face as he fired the last rounds of certainty.

"Shit," he said, putting the sticky gun back into the holster.

"Did he fight back?" asked General Van Riker when he saw the bloody face and right arm of the quiet man.

"No. I just got some of him back at me when I put in my certainty shots. It's a mess."

"Here's your drink. Without ice because I figured you had enough cold out there. The clipboards, please."