Amerika (5 page)

As Caleb spoke, an elegant woman with commanding eyes, thick wavy coal-black hair, and a sensual, feline smile slipped quietly into the classroom. She had an intense, polished, and somehow serpentlike beauty.

“Good, Caleb,” the teacher said. “Can anyone eke tell me the name of this violent philosophy they followed?”

The children could not answer; their indoctrination had not reached that point. The woman raised a hraceleted hand. The teacher beamed at the opportunity to show her admiration and respect for the woman once known as Marion Milford. “Yes, please do tell the class, Ms. Andrews.”

“It’s called Social Darwinism. But now we believe in Social Humanism, which means everyone helps everyone else, and we trust our new leaders to help us do that.” Marion’s voice was gentle, even comforting, but she spoke with absolute conviction.

The teacher smiled. “Boys and girls, let me introduce Caleb’s mother, Ms. Marion Andrews, who is a magistrate here in Chicago and also a member of the National Advisory Committee that helps our president and Congress make important decisions.”

Even without the glowing introduction, the children would have known that this was someone special by her elegant bearing and clothing. She didn’t dress like any of their mothers. Her black silk suit had been made especially for her in Paris, where most of the great fashion designers still flourished. Now, though, their chief customers were the wives of Communist party officials around the world, instead of the wives of corporate moguls and oil princes.

“Thank you, Miss Chavez,” Marion said. “But most important, I’m Caleb’s mom,” she said, smiling. “May I steal him for a moment?”

She led the boy out to the corridor and knelt to his height to face him. Caleb wore dark pants, a white shirt, and the red armband of the Young Lincoln Brigade. He was a blond, blue-eyed child, seemingly intelligent, and eager to please. la the wholesome, open face he presented to his mother was mingled a child’s quiet concern and ultimate trust in his mother’s power to make whatever it was that had made her pull
him
out of class all right again.

“Darling, there’s nothing wrong,” Marion began. “But you know how we’ve talked about your father maybe someday trying to see you?”

“But he’s in the hospital,” Caleb said, his face now clouded with apprehension.

“Well, honey, he’s out now, but he’s not supposed to come anywhere near us. But just in case, I wanted to warn you and your brother not to speak to any strangers, whether you think you recognize them or not, okay?” Caleb nodded silently. “There’ll be a policeman to pick you up after school today and take you home, because I won’t be here.”

“Where axe you going?” the boy demanded.

“lb an important dinner in Omaha with Colonel Denisov. I’ll be back late tonight and I’ll come in and check on you then. Mis. Marin will get your dinner and stay until I get back. Just remember what I said about strangers, okay?”

“Sure,” he said uneasily.

“Okay, back to class.” Caleb started back into the classroom, but then he hesitated and abruptly turned around and rushed into his mother’s arms. “Love you, babe,” Marion assured him.

“Me too, Mom.”

A short limousine ride later, Marion Andrews delivered the same warning to her firstborn, Billy, a freshman at Chicago’s most prestigious private high school. But the older boy’s reaction to the news was dramatically different. Caleb, the baby, barely remembered his hither; Billy remembered Mm vividly as a gentle and affectionate man who had played catch with him, carried him on his shoulders, and spoken to him with a seriousness and respect that adults too seldom show to children. A fiercely independent boy, Billy had remained stubbornly loyal to Ms banished and disgraced father. He’d refused to adopt Ms mother’s maiden
name
of Andrews, used as a smoke screen for the family’s shame. Billy was proud to be a Milford and it was the only name he answered to.

“Where is he?” Billy demanded.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to get reliable information from that far.”

“You’re a big shot. You should be able to find out.”

Marion sighed. “I’m not going to argue what I should or should not be able to do. I’m telling you that an officer will pick you up after school and be at the apartment.”

“I don’t want some prole hanging around, watching me.”

“I told you not to use that word. It may be in among ninth-graders, but you don’t even know what it means.”

Billy stared at the ground. “Whatever ...”

Marion straightened Billy’s sweater. “The officer will pick up your brother first, then come and get you. I’ll be back late—so don’t wait up.” She leaned forward and Mssed him and started to walk away.

“Mom?”

She tamed around, her designer cape moving elegantly around her. “Yes?”

“Do you think he’s all right? I mean, in those hospitals they do stuff like shock treatments and lobotomies.”

She studied him a moment, not quite sure of what she should say. “I’m sure he’s fine. Otherwise they wouldn’t let him out.”

“He was real smart, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Yes he was. Okay, honey, I’ve got to go.”

“I want to see him. They have to let us see him, don’t they?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. He could be”—she hesitated for a moment—“it could be bad for us.”

“I want to see my dad.”

“We’re not going to discuss it right now. We’ll discuss it when I get back. Okay?”

The truck rattled to a halt at the Odessa Relocation Center. Devin and the others from Fort Davis were put into a huge cinderblock compound surrounded by an electrified fence, to await processing. There were perhaps two hundred prisoners waiting there. Outside the fence scores of men and women were calling out names, searching for loved ones or just reasons to keep going.

“My husband,” a woman called, “Clarence Babcock . . . disappeared three years ago ... has anyone seen . . .?”

A dozen voices called, scores of hands waved photographs of loved ones. They had traveled from the east, or from cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston, where pockets of political rebellion still existed. Many of them had seen a loved one simply vanish, and now, when they could, they traveled to remote relocation centers like this one, seeking some shred of hope. They set out in ancient Chevrolets and Mustangs, and sometimes they abandoned the cars en route because they were unable to get fuel. Weeds grew crazily along the little-traveled roads, burying the vehicles under vines and rushes. The seekers continued on foot, wearing through the soles of torn-up running shoes or old loafers meant for short strolls on urban sidewalks, not for five-hundred-mile treks through landscapes grown threatening and inhospitable.

There were thousands missing, tens of thousands. Devin half listened for the occasional instructions over the PA' system.
Stay with your own group. You’ll be processed by camp. No talking . . . move along.

He did not mind the waiting. Prison had taught him to take the long view. This was a bureaucracy and bureaucracies were not evil, only slow and inane. Evil took other forms. Sometimes it was guards who came in the night to take you to small rooms where they attached electrical devices sometimes to your temples,
somet
im
es
to your private parts; sometimes, it was doctors who watched without expression until it was time for them to give you the drugs that were worse than the shocks.
That
was evil; compared to it, waiting in line was a taste of paradise.

Devin walked toward the edge of the fence and looked out toward the town, which from his vantage point looked
alm
ost deserted. His eyes scanned the dusty town square and the drab, unpainted buildings. The air smelled of concrete dust. As lifeless as it all appeared to him, it seemed a glorious glimpse of freedom.

A man’s voice jarred him from his reverie.

“First time I was in Midland-Odessa I was eighteen years old—stopover from Phoenix to Houston. You flew over oil fields for twenty minutes. Lot of money here.”

Devin turned around. The man was fiftyish and overweight. He continued to talk.

“Kind of like going home—-sure looks like it’s changed.”

Devin nodded, not wanting to carry this any further. “Just get in with that Fort Davis group?”

Devin nodded again.

“You hear anything? About the country, I mean, like what’s happening?”

Devin shook his head.

“We can talk. They don’t care.”

“Guess I’m out of practice.”

“Where I was they let you talk. Musta hatched about twenty escape plots a day—-formed a hundred resistance groups for when we got out. You do stuff like that? You know, to pass the time?”

Devin studied the man a moment, then turned and walked away. He approached his group and a prisoner eased past him.

“That guy—he’s a plant,” the prisoner whispered. “Thanks.”

The newcomer looked at Devin with beseeching eyes. “I heard they nuked Seattle—you hear that?” Devin shrugged. He didn’t trust this man, either, Soon the line was moving faster.

The dirt road twisted through the hills north of Milford, the forbidden area out by the Special Services Unit camp. The SSU was one of those paramilitary, quasi-police organizations that created terror by its very vagueness. Among the citizenry, no one quite knew what the SSU did or even who its members were. It was a hodge-podge—so rumor had it—of Russians, for whom life in the military itself held more appeal than any true patriotism or ideal. In some tellings, the SSU was terribly brutal; in other versions of the story, it was simply ineffectual if not benign, a sort of Mdden national guard that was at the ready but almost never called to action. In reality, the SSU operated like the organization in Poland that it was based upon-—-an overseer group, assigned to the countryside, which never intermingled with the local population.

Either way, the SSU turf was off limits to civilians— which was exactly why Justin Milford, in his leather and his goggles, could not resist going there. He rode Ms Harley down the middle of the road until he reached the best vantage point he could find. Then he swerved his motorcycle into the woods, glided past the trees, and came to a stop alongside another cycle parked by an old shed.

His friend Puncher, a big, tough farm boy with red hair, a square jaw, and a sweet lopsided grin, was inside the shed, using a pair of binoculars to study the snow-covered fields in front of them. Justin knelt beside him and heard the rumble of engines in the distance.

“How long they been out?” Justin asked.

“Ten minutes,” Puncher said. “It’s a tactica! unit.”

“Company strength?”

“Platoon.”

“Lemme see,” Justin said, seizing the field glasses.

He observed two black attack helicopters, hovering like giant malignant insects, fire rockets at some distant target. A moment later five black tanks lumbered into view and they too opened fire. A burst of flame shot fifty feet into the air.

“The same drill as last time,” Puncher said.

“The bastards are efficient,” Justin muttered.

More helicopters shot into view, firing their rockets; a Sine of personnel carriers came down the road by the river, and soldiers leaped out of them, firing automatic weapons and flinging grenades.

“Hey, look at that!” Puncher cried. “What the hell are they doing?”

Justin took the binoculars. Off in the distance a fire had started, a long, thin line of flame and crackling debris, as if a huge string of firecrackers had gone off. The acrid smell of phosphorus stung their nostrils.

“A Viper,” Justin declared. “The sons of bitches are testing a Viper.”

“A what?” Puncher asked.

“It’s called a Super Viper—you know, as in snake. It’s a hose, packed with explosives, two hundred meters long. It clears a mine field. A rocket shoots the hose across the field, they set it off, and it clears a path twenty feet wide, for two hundred meters.”

“Jesus, who’s got
min
es?” Puncher asked.

Justin shrugged. “Maybe some of our people. Or maybe they’re testing it for somewhere else in the world.”

Before the flames from the Viper had died down, the exercise abruptly ended. The soldiers returned to their vehicles and within
min
utes the fields were empty and silent again, with only a fast-rising plume of thick black smoke to testify to the SSU’s violent assault.

“Time?” Justin asked.

“Twenty-eight minutes, from barracks to withdrawal.”

Justin shook his head in wonder.

“Of course, nobody was shooting back.” “Someday,” Justin said.

Puncher stood up. “Jesus, I wonder. I mean, are we just playing games?”

“Hell no,” Justin said. “We know things they don’t know we know. Someday we’ll hit the bastards.”

“You goin’ to the Cavern tonight?”

“Maybe,” Justin said. “Don’t know if Jackie can get away.”

“She’s a princess. Pick up somebody there.”

“You’re really primitive, Puncher. Maybe you’d feel more at home on the other side.”