The General's President (31 page)

"Or we can drive there tomorrow; whichever you want. You're the ones been so anxious."

He looked at Mark. Mark felt like he had to take a crap. "Let's do it tonight," Mark said.
And get it over with.
They turned to Phil and Tris. Phil's face was suddenly very sober; Tris was looking at him questioningly.

"Shit!" Phil said. "Tonight, I guess. I tell you what; just now I got the wim-wams."

Rafe laughed again. "You and me both, Phil baby, you and me both. They'll go away though when we see that nice mushroom cloud, and know that the boom is the death knell of nuclear power in the United States. If not the whole world."

"Yeah!" Phil said. The word carried no enthusiasm.

"So we'll bring the stuff here. Then Mark and me can get a few hours sleep before we take you guys and go load it in the plane. We ought to load it about the time it's first getting light out. There probably won't be anyone around the field that time of day to wonder what we're loading."

No one said anything for a moment. "Is that it then?" Mary asked, looking around. "Let's go eat before the food gets cold."

***

At Belgrade, the president's small travel staff remained at the American embassy, as usual, while the president, with the ambassador, carried out their official functions. And as usual, several messages arrived for the president. Zale looked them over. One, from Milstead, described briefly the initial congressional and press reaction to his technical breakthrough statement in the Warsaw speech.

Zale didn't give it to him. There was little the president could do about it from there, and it could be a distraction. He'd give it to him when they left Ankara, ready to start home.

***

The modified old four-place Cessna was flying at 3,000 feet above the west shore of Chesapeake Bay, heading south at 110 mph. The back door was gone. Freezing air snarled through the empty doorway—their bomb bay—but the numbness Tris felt had nothing to do with cold. It had everything to do with the object on the rack beside her.

She'd been visualizing a suitcase bomb, and they'd received it in something much like a metal suitcase. But inside had been a 203mm nuclear artillery shell, rigged with a cargo chute. And an artillery shell looked so overtly, blatantly deadly! In this instance it was twenty kilotons worth of deadly.

She'd almost died after Rafe and Mark had gotten it on the plane. Rafe had taken a short-handled sledge hammer from the pickup and slammed the base of the shell with it as hard as he could!

He'd grinned when she'd screamed. "I was just activating the rear fuse," he'd said over the engine noise, then leaned over Phil's shoulder. "That made the computer inside think it's been fired out of a cannon. The front fuse will activate automatically in twenty minutes. It can't go off till then. Drop it from 3,000 feet, like we talked about. It'll take an impact to explode it, but it can't go off before twenty minutes. It'll take you about fifteen minutes to arrive over target. Then Tris pushes the dump lever and out it goes. Right? You'll have five minutes then to get the hell out. Five minutes is about nine, ten miles, plenty far enough that the shock wave won't wreck you."

Then he and Mark had gotten out, and stood watching as the plane took off.

Phil's voice took her attention off the deadly cylinder beside her. "We're coming up on it," he said. She could see the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant about two miles ahead, sitting in a break in the cliffs. "Be ready. When I raise my right hand, you grab the dump handle. When I chop it downward, dump her."

She said nothing, only nodded. The gesture was lost on him; his eyes were on the plant, as hers were. In a few minutes, five or six, the plant would be ruined—in her imagination a seared and glassy circle.

It was an endless ninety seconds. Phil's right hand lifted, and she clutched the dump lever with hands water-weak. His head was almost pressed against the side window as they drew over the plant, but she didn't notice; her gaze was fixed on his hand. Chop!

Tris pushed the lever, harder than necessary, and the heavy shell, with its cargo-chute pack, slid down the now-tilted rack and out into the icy propellor blast. As she pulled in the static line, she heard the engine roar increase, felt the speed surge. Her guts, which had been tense before, had knotted when she'd released the bomb.

Moving forward, she took the seat beside Phil, pulling off her mittens, unzipping her mountain parka at the throat, and belting herself in. The plant was directly behind, and she couldn't watch the parachute.

Another minute passed, and another; it should be hitting the ground about now, she thought, but nothing had happened. She wondered how much time they had left on their twenty minutes, whether anyone had seen it come down, and if they had, what they were doing.

Phil had been losing altitude, as planned, to gain additional speed and hopefully get below radar pickup height. They were only a hundred feet or so above the bay, with the brow of cliffs cutting off sight of the plant, when the bomb went off. Phil had deliberately avoided watching, but had just glanced out the window at the rear-view mirror when it happened. The flash seemed to sear his eyeballs, even just seen in reflection, through glass, and for a long moment he saw nothing but after-image while he flew on reflexes.

All Tris saw was Phil's face. Her own tightened, and she clung to her seat with both hands. The shock wave, when it caught them, wasn't as bad as she'd feared, and by that time Phil could see again, fuzzily. In a vague, disassociated way, he wondered if his eyes were permanently damaged.

He looked in the mirror again, and blurred though his vision was, he could see the cloud of dust rising on its stem, bigger and more impressive than he'd expected from something no larger than the artillery shell. It rose and rose.

They continued flying south, without exultation, almost without speaking. Phil visualized Air Force pilots sprinting to fighter planes at Langley Field, and Andrews, and probably Dover. When they reached the broad mouth of the Potomac estuary, he climbed to 500 feet.

The pasture they were looking for on the other side was surrounded by woods, but Phil had no trouble finding it. The landing was rough but not dangerously so. By that time his vision was nearly normal. He taxied the elderly Cessna to the edge of the trees; then they climbed out and, still not talking, hurried to a sagging shed nearby, at the end of a wooded lane. They'd padlocked their old Ford Tempo in it more than two weeks earlier.

The shed was cold, smelled dusty, and Phil felt apprehension as he slid behind the steering wheel. He put the key into the ignition, made sure the transmission was in park, pumped the gas his standard six times for cold morning starts, and looked back through the open door, where Tris stood waiting. Somehow she seemed to think she needed to close it after them, as if they were back home in Ohio and this was their garage.

He turned the key then. Nothing. The starter didn't even grunt, didn't even click! He switched it off again, then back on. Nothing.

He didn't try a third time. Didn't even try to get out of the car. Didn't even swear! The battery's dead, he told himself, the battery's dead. After a minute, Tris came in and looked through the window at him.

"What's the matter? Won't it start?"

And he'd be blind tomorrow; he was sure of it. It would happen in his sleep.

"Phil? Phil, for chrissake! Answer me!"

"It won't start," he said, and somehow got out of the car. "The battery's dead."

They left the car. They left the plane. By now, Phil knew, fighters would be in the air. The Cessna had been picked up and tracked by the radar ring encircling the capital; they knew right where it had landed. Police cars were on the road, headed this way.

Tris led him back into the woods, where they'd have cover. They'd walk parallel to the road, she told herself. Walk till they were well away from here, then hitchhike.

She wished they hadn't been too excited to eat breakfast, or that they'd thought to bring a lunch.

The lane met a blacktop road, and she wasn't sure which way to turn. She should have brought the map from the car, she told herself, and turned to Phil. "Which way do we go?"

Phil didn't answer.

"Phil? Phil! Say something!"

"Either way," he said. "Either way."

She turned right and they hiked on through the woods, keeping the road in sight to her left. It was the first time since she'd known Phil that she'd walked faster than he did. Or that he'd walked slower than she.

TWENTY-EIGHT

In Belgrade the president spoke with Yugoslavian Prime Minister Planinc and his Ministers of Industries and Planning. The next day, in Ankara, he spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Ozal and his Ministers of Development and Defense. He made no further public addresses. It was right after his Ankara meeting that he learned of the Calvert Cliffs disaster, less than an hour after it happened. There too, John Zale gave him Milstead's messages on the flap in Congress over his Warsaw speech.

From Ankara he flew to Frankfurt, where he transferred to Air Force One and took off for the States.

He'd thought about spending a day or two at Camp David, resting; he and Lois had never been to Camp David. But this was definitely not the time. He did pause long enough at the Air Force base in Frankfurt for a shower, and a rubdown by a military masseur.

He slept all the way from Frankfurt to Andrews Field, outside D.C. By the time he got back to the White House, it was little more than an hour short of breakfast. He dropped in at the White House kitchen and arranged for his breakfast to be delivered to his desk, then took another shower. After that he walked to the Oval Office and found waiting for him a brief preliminary report on the probable environmental impacts of the Calvert Cliffs bombing. He read it quickly, then began drafting a short speech on the disaster.

At eight o'clock Milstead came in, and the president agreed to meet with Brosnan, Kreiner, Bushnell, and Bender. They were the senior members from each party and each house on the Select Committee on the Emergency. The president also asked that Speaker of the House Lynch, and Senate president pro tem Grosberg be included. If the repeal bill couldn't be stalled in committee, perhaps Lynch and Grosberg would agree to stall it on the floor until he was ready to release his "breakthrough."

Milstead commented that the nuking of the Calvert Cliffs plant had drawn media attention almost entirely off the Warsaw speech.

At 0825, Milstead returned to tell him that the people from Congress would be over at ten o'clock if that met with the president's approval. It did. Haugen told Milstead to sit in on the briefing with them; that he needed to know too.

The president finished the last intelligence summary and looked at the clock. He'd been itching to talk to Dirksma. His secretary had said the director would be in about nine, and would call. It was 0854; that left six minutes or so. Haugen reached for the next report: the weekly summary of the Public Works Administration. It had lots of tables, but the summary table was the only one he gave more than a glance to. Then he scanned the summary list of narrative points: principal complaints, principal accomplishments, major difficulties... It was going better than he'd expected. Quite a lot of people were actually trying to make it work, to get something done, use it for more than a paycheck. Not everyone by any means, but a lot of them. Maybe he was seeing a resurgence of responsibility.

The security phone buzzed; he keyed it on and Dirksma's face appeared on the screen. The time readout at the bottom said 0859:37.

"Good morning, Mr. President. Are you interested in a report on the Blackburn investigation now?"

"Why not?"

"I thought perhaps your time was tied up with yesterday's nuclear bombing."

"Nope. There's nothing I can do about that except make appropriate noises. What have you learned?"

"There's quite a bit of it. I've had a full written report prepared—tabbed, indexed, and summarized. It'll be on its way to you in a few minutes, by courier."

Courier. Why not by modem?
the president wondered.

"In brief though," Dirksma was saying, "we have depositions by three people at the CIA stating that when he took over as director, Dr. Blackburn assigned three men, men who'd written critical reports on him, to work with the guerrillas in Malaysia. That's considered the most dangerous project they have. One refused and resigned; no one seems to know where he is now. After being flown out of Manila, neither of the other two ever reported back, which, considering their experience and other qualifications, is surprising. We suspect they were actually killed enroute.

"Next, we've interviewed several people who've given us verbal data on several offenses Blackburn allegedly committed as an agent. There's no reason to think we couldn't establish some of these as fact, if we wanted to seat a grand jury. But a lot of sensitive information would be involved—a lot of contacts would be put at risk if anything was leaked—and you know the grand jury record on confidentiality."

Dirksma paused as if contemplating grand jury leaks.

"Later, as a field project supervisor, Blackburn also worked on a research project to develop a reliable means for erasing memories and data regarding especially sensitive matters, in covert operations personnel who were going to leave the agency. We've got several notebooks of material on this; it was in a personal code, but we had no trouble breaking it. We've verified some of the contents, and there's more than enough incriminating evidence there to jail him, if he hadn't suicided. He brought foreign employees in to experiment on, and a couple of them died. We have no evidence that the procedures were ever used by the agency though, not even while Blackburn was director. Their legality is extremely dubious, even if they worked properly, and for erasing memories, they simply were not accurate. They could leave you with a vegetable or an amnesiac or an unpredictable psychotic, any of which could have brought about an investigation."

The president stared grimly into the CRT; Dirksma went on with his report.