Directive 51 (24 page)

“Well, I could go out, and I think it would be a good idea,” Bambi said, “I know the budget is tight but—”

“Ha. It’ll never be
that
tight. We need someone at the interrogation. Take that next flight, and I’ll make sure we pay, and they expect you. Be there when they interrogate Roth.”

“On my way, thanks.” Bambi hung up, and Heather let herself have a moment of pure envy; maybe when Bambi flew back, she’d have a couple good stories.
I can listen to them over tea while I adjust my shawl.
Heather turned back to her work.

“Do you always look so mournful when you have to spend emergency budget?” Lenny asked, from beside her.

“Mourning my lost youth,” she said. “Biggest crisis since I was born, and I’ve got an office job.”

Kai-Anne had wanted to live a long way from the base if she could, and Greg had been his usual agreeable self, even though all the extra driving fell on him. She’d sometimes worried that it was one more of her eccentricities that might mark him as a dead-ender for promotions, but he’d just laughed at her and said that compared to wanting to fly a Hog in the first place, living far from the base and marrying a tattooed lady was nothing.

Still, this was one night when she wished she’d thought about how long the drive was before locating the family; it hadn’t been easy to find an emergency sitter, when she found out he was coming home that night, and she’d owe Mrs. Grawirth a lot of favors. And it had been a long haul down to Davis-Monthan, and now it had been a long haul back.

She knew what he’d been referring to when, just out of the base, he’d said, “Hon, the A-10 that did the job was me. Maybe talk about it later?” So it had been no surprise that he’d slumped in the passenger seat beside her, not asleep but not really there, just resting his eyes on the distant hills.

Kai-Anne had known something about this; she’d seen residual bits of it when he’d come back from Pakistan, from Iran, from Eritrea. She’d just never seen it so fresh and raw before. After driving about three miles, she’d asked, as gently as she could, “Want to hear about the kids and my day and all that?”

“Yeah.”

So she’d told him, more or less as if dictating an e-mail into her iScribe, the way she did every day when he was overseas, so that he could have the news but not necessarily the catch in her throat or the tears in her eyes; she felt that dealing with her loneliness and missing him should be at his option.

Nearly always he’d call after he finished the letter, and they’d talk, and it would be company, but now and then after a bad day, or pulling extra duty, he’d drop her a note that said only,
Sorry, can’t tonight.

She finished the kids’ adventures of the day as they approached the Marana city limit. “What would you like to do when we get home?” she asked. “The kids’ll be asleep.”

“Truth is, after something like this, I like to sit out and look at the stars. I was thinking I’d drag the chase lounge away from the pool and out into the back yard.”

“Would you like company? We’ve got another chaise.”

“Okay, you take the
shezz
and I’ll take the
chase
.” His favorite joke about the only thing she remembered from two years of French. “As long as you promise to try to sleep, young lady. I usually don’t till really late. Somewhere around dawn I’ll want to take a shower and go to bed.” He stretched, and said, “And thanks for going along with my weirdness. I don’t usually get to do this after combat missions.” He sighed. “Then again, I don’t shoot down and kill the vice president every day, either.”

They didn’t say anything else while they set up the chaise longues to sleep on; she left a window open in Chloe’s room, and the boys’, so she could hear if she was needed, and when she returned from making sure everything was all right inside, Greg was already focused on the stars, as if he might fall right into the sky. But he whispered, “I love you,” as she pulled the covers over herself, and she said it back.

“All right,” Cameron said, looking around from the center of the room.

“Marshall, up on the screen please.”

The big screen displayed:

“Anyone have any ideas about what else needs to be in the announcement?”

“If they can’t put the fuel down the drain, how do they discard it?” a woman asked from the far corner.

“Working on that, but we may have no answer,” a man scribbling on a pad next to Cam said.

“Tell them to take the precautions they would if they were going to lose power or other utilities in the next few days,” Edwards suggested.

“Tell them to take special care if they have family members with electronic or plastic artificial parts,” Lenny said. “Keep plastic surfaces and electrical contacts clean, and don’t unnecessarily expose them to outside air.”

There were a half dozen more suggestions before Cam said, “All right, that’s it, that will go out on every channel as—”

From the hallway next to the big screen, Roger Pendano came in, standing tall, his eyes dry. He’d combed his hair and straightened his clothes.
He still looks like hell,
Heather thought.

Graham Weisbrod moved quietly into the room behind him, standing against the wall, with his hands behind his back.

“Mr. Nguyen-Peters, I have something for you,” Pendano said, “that may or may not be helpful, but I think is necessary.” His voice was flat, dull, and emotionless. He held out a piece of paper. “Here.”

Cameron reached out as if he were being handed a live cobra or electric wire. He read. “Mr. President, are you
sure
that this is what you want to do?”

“No, but I’m quite sure it’s the best thing for the country.” For the first time, Pendano seemed to see the hundred other people in the main ops room. “It’s very simple. I’ve invoked Section Three of Amendment Twenty-five; I’m declaring myself temporarily incapable. I need to get out of the way and let someone who can focus solve the problem. I’m going to go out the back way and return to the White House, and put myself in the care of a doctor. Then, I suppose, we shall see. Thank you all for your patience.”

He shook Cameron’s hand. “Just do your duty; don’t second-guess yourself too much.” To Graham he added, “Dr. Weisbrod, I’m sorry that I’m not quite up to the job you always thought I had the ability for. I thought so, too, but I guess we were both wrong.”

“Roger, please don’t—”

“We’ll talk, some day when there’s time.” He looked around at them as if memorizing their faces. “Everything else can wait. Get this country a President, and then . . . and then . . .”

To Heather’s horror, he began to cry, first just sobbing with tears trickling down his face, still standing upright, trying to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, but then bending forward and breaking down completely, great wracking howls and cries, like a tantruming child, or a wounded ape. Weisbrod and Cam rushed to his side. The Secret Service had him out the door in another moment, but not one of the hundred people in the room could un-see what they had just seen, no matter how much they might wish it.

Del had walked toward the lights of the distant town. With his flashlight also dead, he’d been unable to find his sneakers in the dark truck cab, and he’d had to walk there in his cowboy boots. He found a cop waiting by the main road, and before he’d gotten half his story out, the policeman had introduced him to a chemistry teacher from the local high school, and they were on their way back, in the police cruiser, to take samples from Del’s truck.
At least I have one hell of a good excuse,
he thought.
Also, that hippie asshole that tricked me into taking that black egg? I don’t mind describing him three thousand times if it means they catch his stupid butt. I’m just sorry they can’t hang him.

One particular Daybreaker in Boston had hated noise and rude people and hurry, and so he’d taken the job at Logan International; he’d had a chance to brush biote solution on hundreds of airplane tires that day. The first one happened in Tucson; the tire sensors told the pilot he couldn’t very well land on all flat tires, so after some discussion with the ground, they brought the airliner in on Ford Lake in Lakeside Park; it was a mess, but everyone survived what had to be the shallowest water landing in airline history, and at least there were plenty of cabs and buses there to pick them up in the city.

The next one had also picked up nanoswarm, and had to ditch in the Mississippi near St. Louis, unable to radio to explain what he intended; it would have been all right if he hadn’t collided with a police rescue boat, but still, there were only six deaths.

Then at LAX, the tire sensors were gone and another flight tried to land on the landing gear, not knowing that the tires were rotted and the hydraulic fluid was leaking; there were over fifty deaths. From there on, it became worse; there was still enough television and Internet to make sure everyone heard about it and began to look suspiciously at their neighbors.

Almost half of the Lookout Pass truck train, which hit a patch of failed IBIS on a downgrade, went off a cliff, and that was the most spectacular loss of its kind. But the worst was actually in western Kansas, near Hays, when over four hundred trucks cyber-linked in a train, including seven gasoline trucks, a truckload of liquid ammonia, and a double trailer of liquid oxygen, had picked up enough biotes to weaken most of the tires. When deer wandered onto the highway in front of the lead truck, the four hundred trucks were moving at almost one hundred miles per hour, and the IBIS station nearest the front truck relayed correct braking instructions as the first driver hit his brakes. The third truck, however, lost eleven tires and rolled; forty trucks piled into it, and a failed IBIS station didn’t allow for quick-enough braking for the next hundred or so trucks. An oxygen-gasoline mixture in the tangled wreckage ignited, setting off an explosion from the ammonia-gasoline mix behind it, and the flame front swept down the line and caught the rest of the gasoline trucks. Two more failed IBIS stations and uncountable burst tires completed the process; all but the last nine trucks were caught up in the vast wreck before anyone had time to react.

Power had already begun to fail in the small towns in that area, so there was nothing to hide the brilliant flames towering up into the sky. The best guess was that about 350 truckers died, along with about twenty State Troopers, firefighters from Hays and Goodland, and citizen volunteers trying to rescue people from the wreckage. It was never really possible to determine an exact number; in some areas near the center of the wreck, steel and aluminum ran and puddled onto the pavement.

A local reporter with video of the event, unable to access the Internet, tried to drive to Wichita with his video; at four A.M., walking away from his no-longer-running car on his rapidly decaying tennis shoes, he was run over by a headlightless van that was trying to get home before anything else stopped working.