The General's President (46 page)

And the country was already suffering from lack of fuel oil. The president shook his head.

"In other words," he said, "we're looking at the beginning of a weatherwar. Is that it?"

"Yes sir. You could call it that."

"What would happen if we used our own transmitters to disrupt the pattern? Can we do that?"

"We could. Last night I ran a number of alternative scenarios with our computer models, assuming a variety of Soviet responses. And while our prediction models aren't designed for a sequence of manipulations and counter-manipulations, some of the results seem to be worse than doing nothing. So frankly sir, I'm a little afraid of what might happen if we tried to break it up. If the Soviets would simply let us break the pattern, I'd have no qualms. But I can't see any reason why they would."

"And there's no natural explanation at all for this jet stream shift? Could the Mount Spurr ash drift have anything to do with it?"

"No sir. And actually, two jet streams are involved. A northern and a southern. We're sure that location of the northern one is the result of Soviet manipulation: The pressure cells could hardly have formed naturally where and when they did in the pressure milieu immediately preceding them, and our on-site instrument check detected low-grade heat extractions to maintain them in place."

"All right. Can you people produce comparably severe weather for Russia?"

"I've run some models on that too, sir. We can give Russia her worst snowstorm in maybe fifty years, and follow it with a helluva coldwave."

"What will this do to the weather in central and western Europe?"

"Italy, the Balkans, Turkey—they'll all get fairly prolonged heavy precipitation—rain near the coast, and snow inland and at high elevations where they normally get snow. A maybe once-a-decade size storm there. It'll pretty much miss West Germany, but it'll be heavy in Poland and Czechoslovakia. And Finland. It'll be very heavy in Rumania and worse to the north and east, then slacking off past the Urals.

"I'm talking about something like thirty inches or more in the region from maybe Odessa to Minsk, Volgograd to Gorkiy, slacking off past the Urals. And with winds and drifting. It'll be a calamity.

"That'll be followed by a cold wave of the sort they get maybe once in ten to twenty years."

The president looked the council over. "Comments?"

"What will the Soviets do," asked Valenzuela, "when we've done that?"

"Good question." Haugen turned to Gupta. "I don't suppose you have an answer for it?"

Gupta shook his head. "It's impossible to say how the Soviets will react."

"Any other comments? Jumper, what's on your mind?"

"They've got more transmitters than we have; twelve to three. What will that mean if we make a contest out of this?"

"The twelve to three difference in transmitters won't mean much for the United States and Canada," Gupta answered. "Not if the Soviets stick to weatherwar. They can create and maintain bad weather over a lot more of the world than we can, but I don't see that as an advantage to them.

"Of course, they might decide to create some earthquakes and eruptions, and our highly susceptible west coast areas have a lot of people in them, while the most susceptible Soviet area, the Kamchatka Peninsula, has very few. The Caucasus would be our best retaliation site. But seismic warfare is likely to escalate into explosive energy releases anyway, and then go nuclear, and I can't visualize the Kremlin taking that risk."

Haugen could visualize it. He pursed his wide mouth, then exhaled gustily. "Now I think we know why they triggered the Mount Spurr eruption; Pavlenko assumed we'd be afraid to retaliate against this." He scanned the serious faces around the table. "Okay, I'm going to make a tentative battle plan. Jim, I want you to monitor the pressure cells they've created; see if they're maintaining them in place. If they're still in place twenty-four hours from now, give the Kremlin a blizzard to remember.

"Any disagreement?" He looked around, his eyes pausing for just a second on the silent Jesuit, but it was Valenzuela who responded.

"What would you think of communicating with Pavlenko first?"

"Not much, Val. I'm convinced the man is psychotic. Any sign of sweet reason, he'd read as weakness, and escalate, try to drive us to our knees. On the other hand, if we confront him, he may back down."
Or will he? If he's psychotic?

An emergency phone rang beside the president. He picked up the privacy receiver. "This is the president. What is it?"

The others watched the president as he listened. His face paled. After about a minute he said "thank you," hung up, and looked around. "Gentlemen," he said, "what appears to have been a neutron cluster warhead was exploded over Pretoria, South Africa, a few minutes ago. Considering the weapon, and the population of the district, the dead should number something like half a million. And Pretoria being the administrative capital of the RSA, we can also assume their government's been wiped out.

"Satellite data shows it was fired from coastal forest in southern Mozambique. We can assume the Mozambique government got the missile and the launcher, and certainly the warhead, from the Soviets. It looks like Soviet intimidation—something to scare the world. The American and European publics especially. And most particularly me.

"Any possibilities I've overlooked on this?"

Valenzuela shook his head slowly. "It's inconceivable that the British would have provided it, or the French. Or the Israelis. The evidence is that no one else can make that kind of warhead."

The president nodded. "All right, let's adjourn this meeting. Val, you need to draft a statement for the press concerning the Pretoria tragedy. Not pointing a finger at anyone; we'll let others do that. And let me see it before you release it."

He turned to Gupta. "Jim, don't wait twenty-four hours. Crank up your blizzard today."

***

Arne Haugen and Stephen Joseph Flynn watched the noon news together. The fatality estimate was 540,000, white and black. The camera footage was gruesome. It was summer in South Africa, and daylight saving time; the warhead had exploded during evening rush hour, and it had not yet been dark when the television helicopters had overflown Pretoria. The streets were full of wrecked and stalled cars, the downtown sidewalks littered with dead. Small bodies lay strewn about a playground.

There was little visible damage to structures, and radioactivity was minor, but the death toll was staggeringly complete. There was no visible trace of movement; apparently it was too late in the day for vultures to be abroad, and smaller birds had not yet infiltrated from outside the death area. Tomorrow would be uglier, Haugen told himself, and the next day worse.

"What is there to say?" asked the president.

Father Flynn shook his head. He couldn't think of anything.

FORTY-THREE

Sergeant Kurt Marais stood at the .50 calibre pintle gun, knees slightly bent, braced against the movement of the solitary armored personnel carrier as it rolled down the graveled South African road. The summer rains had been sparse, and six large tires and the air stream raised a long, conspicuous train of dust.

Except for themselves, the road seemed abandoned. Apparently every white in the region who hadn't been called up in the mobilization, or killed, had headed south.

The APC was traveling at 20 mph, fast enough considering they weren't going anywhere in particular, and the low speed conserved fuel. The day before, they'd found the Hoopstad base abandoned and its diesel fuel gone. The company had pooled the fuel it had with it then, abandoning six of its sixteen vehicles, carrying the extra men mostly on top, and headed south for Bultfontein. A bunch of bloody kaffirs with rockets and automatic weapons had ambushed them from a hillside, and been routed of course, but not before the company had lost two vehicles and twenty-eight men.

They'd found Bultfontein abandoned too, with no more fuel than there'd been at Hoopstad. So again they'd pooled what they had left, filling the tanks of three and partly filling another. Then Captain Temborg had asked for volunteers to go on foot, to go shooting kaffirs until they were dead themselves or out of ammunition. Every man had shouted or growled his readiness—they were all from Pretoria, and most had had family there. Temborg had chosen the youngest.

They'd spent the night at Bultfontein. There'd been kaffirs about, their calls eerie in the darkness. But there hadn't been enough of them to feel like attacking the APCs. At dawn the men on foot had moved out. Most of the rest had headed south for Bloemfontein—it was anyone's guess what they'd find there—but Marais' machine, the one with less than half a tank of fuel, would never make it. So with Temborg's blessing, Marais had driven off with his squad, on their own, to kill kaffirs.

Only once had they seen any near enough to go after. The ground there hadn't been difficult—a field of fresh-cut sorghum stubble—and the APC had given chase. He'd ripped eighteen with the pintle gun, its huge slugs killing almost every man they'd hit. Or as good as killed them. But mostly the kaffirs seemed to be keeping away from vehicle roads, staying to rougher country. So Marais had shot cattle, any he'd seen within range; they were all kaffir now anyway. And soon he'd be out of fuel. Then they'd have to abandon vehicle and pintle gun, so there was no reason to spare its ammunition.

Most farms they'd passed had been burned out, and a couple of times they'd seen recognizably human bones scattered about, picked clean by the vultures or jackals. Only the scraps of clothing suggested whether they'd been black or white. Marais had seen several burned out cars and trucks, too, and an abandoned tank—an ancient Comet holed and scorched. What it had been doing where it was, was anyone's guess. Its fuel tank was empty, of course.

The Willemsdaal couldn't be far ahead, Marais thought, though how near he wasn't sure; the kaffirs had pulled down and burned the road signs and mileage signs. His fuel wouldn't last long, and there should be a live stream in the Willemsdaal, where they could camp, and plan what to do next.

Marais watched carefully as they approached a set of fire-gutted farm buildings with trees in the yard, about a hundred meters from the road. Even at that distance, the whitewashed walls were soot-grayed. He caught a glimpse of movement there, but before the sound of gunfire could arrive, before he could swing his machine gun toward it, a bullet slammed him. His knees gave way and he slid down inside the APC, shocked semi-conscious for a moment, then felt the vehicle speed up as two of the men untangled his limbs and pulled off his shirt. A moment later the vehicle turned toward the buildings, lurching across the dry and shallow ditch. Old Brant had clambered up to man the pintle gun, and Marais heard its deep staccato slamming, drowning out the lighter sound of kaffir automatic rifles.

Then the APC braked, stopped, Brant continuing to fire the .50 calibre as the others went out the troop door, their own automatic rifles in hand. All but a cursing Celliers, who'd slapped a pad of surgical sponge on the hole in Marais' upper chest and was wrapping him round with bandage. The firing intensified; a grenade roared, and another. Then it quieted. There were a few single shots.

Marais felt no great pain, but it was getting harder to breathe, and he was weak and dizzy. Something fell on him, something wet. He was on his back, and focused his gaze on the gun hatch. Brant too had been shot, had fallen partly over the coaming, and blood had run down his body, his leg. Now it was starting to trickle off his boot.

The squad was returning, men climbing back into the vehicle, swearing excitedly or mechanically. Marais was going to ask if there were any more casualties, but it was too much work to speak, almost too hard now to keep his eyes open. It occurred to him that he was dying.

***

The president's January 26 address on health, before the executive council of the American Medical Association.

Thank you, gentlemen, for allowing me to talk to you. I should point out that what I say here is being said not only to you but to the rest of the nation, although the subject will be more immediate to you than to most people. The topics I'll talk about specifically are malpractice suits, the cost of health care, the assurance of medical competency, and the right to die.

Regarding malpractice suits: I presume that most of you know about the changes in our legal system. Malpractice suits will no longer be a rich field for harvesting by unethical attorneys. A physician can no longer be successfully sued when he is without fault, and attorneys now have a strong incentive to avoid clearly groundless suits. Punitive damages will no longer fatten an attorney's bank account.

The insurance industry has been informed of what the government expects from them in the way of rate reforms over the full spectrum of liability insurance, including medical malpractice insurance. Exactly what the new rates will be, we should know very soon. They will be a lot lower.

Physicians will continue to be held responsible and accountable for their competence and ethics, of course. Legal reform does not change that. The main effects of legal reform on the area of malpractice will be to avoid wrongful lawsuits and help relieve the profession and the general public of unconscionable costs.

Modern medical costs remain intolerably high. This is not a serious problem for the wealty, of course, but the great majority of Americans are not wealthy. Medical costs for middle-income Americans can be a crushing, impoverishing blow, or in some cases a constant impoverishing drain. The poor may find free treatment available to them, but involving such difficulties of transportation, for example, and occasionally such resentment on arrival, as to discourage seeking and receiving it.

At the same time, competent physicians deserve a high level of reward. The cost and demands of their education, and of equipping a medical practice, have to be recovered. Their work is often very demanding and their hours can be long.

Also the development of a new medicine can cost a pharmaceutical company many million dollars, which they have to earn back. Hopefully those companies will be more willing to work on development when they don't have greedy litigation lawyers hanging like hyenas around their perimeter, hoping to get rich off some rare, unpredictable, and unavoidable side effect.