Warhead Read online

  Text copyright © 2019 by Jeff Henigson

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Geo Law

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525647904 (trade) — ISBN 9780525647928 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780525647911

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part 2

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part 3

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Afterword

  A Letter

  Understanding the Cold War

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Oh, my dear mother, who knew I’d make it?

  You, of course. But to be here now,

  together—it’s a blessing.

  •

  To Monique: I’d follow you to any dance floor.

  One day in the spring of 1981, as I twiddled my thumbs under my desk in Mrs. Hawkins’s fourth-grade class while she droned on about adding and subtracting fractions, there was a familiar knock—tap tada tap tap—on our classroom door. She went over to answer it, and framed in the background sunlight was my mom. I’d begged Mom that morning—that whole week, in fact—to take me out to the Mojave Desert to watch the space shuttle Columbia return from its maiden voyage, but she said Dad would be stuck in the office and the trip would cost my brother and me two days of school, so we’d just have to watch it on the news. All morning in class, I’d been sulking.

  But there was my mom, chatting with Mrs. Hawkins, who turned my way and motioned to me to come over. I stuck my tongue out at Jake McCoy, who’d been teasing me all morning about how my plan to see the shuttle land had failed, and I smiled at Chelsea Ashworth, who’d been consoling me, and then I practically skipped to the door. It was the happiest moment in my ten-year-long life so far, because I knew I’d soon be witnessing a miracle.

  Mom had the family camper waiting for my brother and me in the school parking lot. Ted, chubby then and two years older than me, claimed the window seat. I didn’t complain. Mom wasn’t in the best mood, muttering something as she pulled out about how Dad was always working, and I didn’t want to push it. I wanted him to be with us, but not if he was all stressed out over a case he was working on. Mom was still talking to herself when we reached the turnoff for Highway 14, the road that would get us to Edwards Air Force Base. “I’m just not going to let you boys miss history being made,” she said, shaking her head.

  We woke up early the next morning, in the camper, parked on the desert floor. She poured us each a cup of orange juice and set a variety pack of cereals on the pullout dining table. “Are you excited?” she said, looking closely at us.

  Ted nodded, eyes wide, as he downed his OJ.

  “Heck yeah,” I said.

  Mom’s face broke into a smile.

  “Good,” she said. “Very good.”

  After breakfast, we stepped out of the camper onto the dry lake bed. Below us were fire ants, emerging from cracks and disappearing into others, and around us, in every direction, were cars and trucks and motor homes—and people standing or scurrying between them. It was good we didn’t need to be anywhere in particular for the landing—just out there on the desert floor with everyone else—because we couldn’t have moved fifty feet if we’d wanted to. It was like the whole world was out there waiting with us.

  A little after ten o’clock in the morning, twin booms went off as the shuttle pierced the atmosphere. An announcer had already told us it would take a while before we could actually see the shuttle, but still everyone had their necks craned. I scanned the sky the way the famous fighter pilot Chuck Yeager had done when he was going after German fighter planes in World War II. I was the first person in our area to see the space shuttle, and I screamed. Everyone around me was asking, “Where, where is it?” and I just extended a finger. It was a full ten seconds before my brother picked it up—and he had Dad’s binoculars.

  That was all it took for me. I knew what I wanted, what I would become. From that moment on, I was certain that one day I’d be getting on top of a rocket myself.

  * * *

  •

  Not long after the space shuttle landing, I ordered an Alpha III model rocket launch kit from Estes. It arrived during the school week, and Mom handed it to me the moment I got home. She stood there smiling as my eyes lit up, her hands on her waist and her chin held high.

  In no time at all, I’d put the rocket together. I couldn’t wait to show it to Dad. Mom told me he’d be home late that evening, but I begged her to let me stay up. I sat there by the front door, in my pajamas with my teeth brushed, until his car pulled in at 9:29 p.m., nearly half an hour after my bedtime. The second he walked through the door, I presented my rocket to him, proudly. “I built it all by myself, Dad,” I said, sticking out my chest. “We can slide an engine into the tube here and set it up on the launchpad, and then the two of us can fire it off!”

  He set his briefcase down and held his hand out for the rocket, which I eagerly handed over. He ran his fingers over the white nose cone; down the long, checkered cardboard tube; and finally to the black plastic fins. He gently tugged at the metal hook coming out of the base of the rocket, the piece that held one of the insertable rocket engines in place.

  “Isn’t it the greatest, Dad?”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. I thought he’d be impressed. He handed the rocket back to me. I repeated myself, this time scratching my head. “It’s great, right?”

  “It is well constructed.” Dad cleared his throat. “I think it’s important, though, that we contemplate why human beings created rockets. Why do you think they exist?”

  I frowned. “To launch people into space.” I thought it was kind of obvious.

  “That is a much more recent application. The original purpose of rockets, and the central one of modern missiles, which are essentially rockets with built-in guidance systems, is to wreak havoc on one’s perceived enemy, to cause death and destruction. Armed with nuclear warheads, missiles have the very real potential to bring an end to humanity.”

  His eyes focused on mine as he waited for me to g
rasp the gravity of his observation. Since I was a ten-year-old, it went mostly over my head.

  I tried to change the subject. He’d definitely be impressed when he saw my rocket take off. “This is just a model, Dad,” I said. “It can fly for real, though. Would you like to launch it from the back deck with me this weekend?”

  He looked instantly irritated. “It may be a model, but launching it in an environment such as ours would be perilous.”

  I protested. “People launch them all the time.”

  Dad snorted. “If they in fact do, they’re foolish. Rocket engines produce significant amounts of heat,” he said. His voice had sharpened. “You may have noted that here in Southern California our hills are covered with dry brush.”

  “Our backyard isn’t. You and Mom planted lots of trees and plants and stuff.”

  “Can you ensure the rocket will land there? I think not.” He sounded annoyed. “It could touch down in the Petersons’ backyard, and we nearly lost our home a few years ago to a brush fire that started there.”

  He seemed to be recalling the near disaster. His nostrils flared.

  I stared at him blankly. He was clearly upset with me, but I was too young to understand why. That was when I heard the door to the back deck open, and paws scurrying through the living room. Mom had returned from taking Jezebel and Penelope, our Newfoundlands, out to do their evening business. “There are my girls!” Dad said when he saw them, his voice an octave higher, slowed and soothing. The frustration on his face disappeared. He quickly dropped to one knee, vigorously rubbing Penelope’s head. Jezebel nudged him, and after a while he turned to her and scratched her back until she flipped over to expose her belly. He rubbed away, with Penelope eyeing for a round herself. It seemed to go on for ages.

  When he finally stood, I realized I hadn’t come up with anything to say. Dad looked at his watch. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  I turned and walked toward my room, running into Ted in the kitchen. He’d been listening to the whole conversation.

  “Looks like the doofus just crashed and burned,” he said as I passed him. I wanted to turn around and whack him, but my eyes were filling with tears, and the last thing I needed was for my brother to see me cry.

  The traffic lights on Colorado Boulevard were timed so well that even on a bike you could get through six or seven of them without stopping. You couldn’t do that the first time you rode, of course, but I’d been cruising down that boulevard every single day since ninth grade let out, racing six miles from my home in South Pasadena to C&H Surplus to see if any new parts had come in for my laser project. By then I could practically make it through those intersections with my eyes shut. It was hot out, your typical Southern California summer, but the breeze that formed from me biking so fast was cooling.

  My laser project wasn’t just me geeking out. There was an actual point to it: to help get me into space. Kids think the only way to become an astronaut is to start out as a pilot, but Dad told me studying science was a much better route. “Pilot astronauts may get you into space,” he said, “but once there, it’s the science astronauts who do the more substantive work.” The project would look good on my applications to Caltech and MIT—maybe enough to help them ignore how badly I’d blown freshman chemistry.

  I was coming up on Allen Avenue, where my buddy Paul lived. His dad, a Caltech scientist, was trying to get one of his experiments brought up on the next space shuttle mission. Paul had been gone most of the summer, which, considering the fact he was my best friend, had made life a little boring.

  Lucia popped into my head then. She’d been out of town, too, which was probably good if I was to have any chance of getting my project completed. We’d made out last summer, just after they let us out of eighth grade.

  I pedaled harder now, smiling with Lucia on my mind as I soared down the boulevard. As I entered the intersection, I looked across it to see a van quickly approaching from the opposite direction. Its left turn signal was switched on, but it didn’t seem to be slowing.

  Frantically, I grasped my brake levers, which locked my wheels, causing my tires to lay down a straight black line. I could see the driver now, a middle-aged woman, her eyes elsewhere, as she swung her van into a turn.

  There was nowhere for me to go.

  Deep in my gut, there was a crushing panic. The last thing I remembered was flying.

  * * *

  •

  Something that drove me up the wall was all the people telling me how lucky I was to have survived getting smacked by that van. Give me a break, I thought. If I’d actually been lucky, the lady wouldn’t have splattered me in the first place.

  Huntington Hospital just happened to be the hospital where I was born—exactly fifteen years, four months, and twenty-two days before that lady almost ended my life. After the crash, three people at the hospital told me about my good fortune. The only one I didn’t feel like punching was the really cute nurse with the blondish-brown hair who was standing over me when I first woke up. Actually, until she opened her mouth, I thought it was Lucia hovering over me. But then the lady spoke—“It looks like somebody’s awake”—and it definitely wasn’t Lucia’s voice.

  “Where am I?” I mumbled.

  “You’re in an emergency room.” I glanced down at my arm, tracing the tube sticking out of it to a bag hanging on a pole next to my bed. An electronic box below the bag was beeping. I kind of instinctively sniffed at the room, but there were plastic tubes in my nostrils. “You were in an accident,” the nurse continued. I remembered the van crossing in front of me, but that was it. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Jeff.”

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  “It’s 1986.”

  “And do you know who our president is?”

  “He’s an actor.”

  She laughed and told me I was at Huntington Hospital. After several more questions, she asked for my parents’ names and their phone numbers. I gave her everything and she said, “You really are lucky, you know?”

  “Maybe I would be if you gave me your phone number,” I said. She was still laughing when I fell back asleep.

  The next time I opened my eyes, my father, who happened to be a modern-day replica of Abraham Lincoln, was standing at the foot of my hospital bed. He really did look just like Lincoln, from his wrinkled forehead to his long, broad nose to his scraggly beard. On Halloween five years earlier, my dad had opened the door in the same suit he’d worn to work that morning and a little girl said, “Trick or treat, Mr. Lincoln!”

  Dad didn’t rush over and hug me. He just stood there, his eyes focused in on mine, as I blinked a few times.

  “How are you feeling, son?” he said. My body was aching everywhere.

  “Like I just got hit by a van.” I kind of wanted a hug. “Where’s Mom?”

  “They weren’t able to reach her. They’re going to release you shortly, so you’ll see her soon.” I nodded. “The good news is you don’t have a significant head injury.” Just like the nurse, he went on to tell me how lucky I was.

  He didn’t actually use the word “lucky.” He said I was “fortunate.” Grandma told me once that my dad never used a two-syllable word when there was a synonym that was longer. The result was that he always sounded professorial—exactly the kind of word he’d use. He was also pedantic, which happened to be one of my favorite words because it described him perfectly. He was so nitpicky about language that you couldn’t make it through a story without being interrupted—and corrected—at least once. My cousin said that was just the way lawyers were, but half of my friends had lawyers as parents, and none of them spoke like that.

  So, Dad said I was fortunate. I said, “How’s that, exactly?”

  “You have no significant head injury and no broken bones. It could have been considerably worse. Good that you were wearing a helme
t.”

  That told me how much he was listening at dinner two nights before when Mom told him I accidentally left my helmet at McDonald’s and it was gone when I went back. “I wasn’t,” I said, and he just cleared his throat.

  The ER head honcho doc strolled in then, which saved me from sitting through more of my dad’s weirdness. The doc was with his goons, and he let them poke me and ask all their questions. When Dad mentioned that I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, the chief waved away his lackeys and did the exam himself. After a gazillion more taps, pokes, and questions, he shook his head and said, “Remarkable.”

  I asked him what was so remarkable, and he said something like “You were struck by a moving vehicle, you weren’t wearing a helmet, and all you appear to have are lacerations, abrasions, and hematomas.” Right after that was when he joined the club the nurse had started, saying, “You’re a lucky young man.”

  * * *

  •

  Fifteen minutes later, Mom saw me hobbling on crutches down the stairs to the house. We lived in Monterey Hills, right smack on top of one of them, at the very end of a long cul-de-sac. There was a flower garden out front. Behind the garden was a hefty stucco wall with openings on two sides, one a glass door for people and the other a sliding glass gate for cars. Whichever way you entered, you’d have to go down a long set of stairs (which passed through another garden). At the bottom of those stairs was our house, made almost entirely of glass. Everybody was amazed the first time they saw it, and while I would agree it was kind of cool, I never liked its location, far away from the rest of the world. Everybody had their thing, though, and the isolated house was my dad’s.