Arc Light (47 page)

It was a gold mine of information. One after another the headlines rocked Chandler, his jaw dropping with each revelation. The world was exploding with change. WILL PRESIDENT LIVINGSTON DISSOLVE NATO? the large type of one headline read, and underneath, two different stories in two columns:
U.S. CONSIDERS NEW PACT WITH BRITISH, OTHERS
and
FRANCE AND GERMANY REFUSE TO SUPPORT U.S.

Chandler quickly scanned the first article. “Secretary of State Anderson last night began negotiation of a new ‘Treaty on Euro-American Military Security' with his counterparts from the United
Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Iceland, Greece and Turkey. ‘TEAMS' would, if approved by the newly combative Congress (see story on p. 17), establish a political and military alliance among the signatories that could replace NATO upon its collapse, which appears imminent.”

“President Authorizes Full Mobilization,” another major headline read;
DRAFT TO BE UNIVERSAL FOR MALES
, the smaller line beneath it read. “Despite the controversy with Congress, the President signed an order authorizing the Selective Service Administration to begin the call-up of all males and of up to thirty-five percent of all females, between the ages of eighteen and twenty. Administration spokesmen went to great lengths to ensure the Russian government that the influx of personnel, which could ultimately swell the ranks of the armed forces with up to 2,750,000 men and 500,000 women, was by no means intended to be perceived as a threat of continued hostilities. Senior members of the Livingston Administration also asserted that the inductions would be staged over many months and perhaps years, and that after basic training, recruits would not necessarily be posted to combat units but might instead be used to rebuild war-damaged sites in the U.S. Despite those assertions, however, defense analysts around the world are viewing the announcement of a major call-up as another of a series of signs coming out of Washington in past days that the inception of general hostilities is viewed as imminent.”

In the middle of the page, a grainy photo's caption read “U.S.S.
Fife
limps into Yokohama. Dozens feared perished. Japanese gather at docks to protest ship's presence.” Chandler studied the photo of the wounded ship. It was small—a destroyer—and it was listing. Smoke billowed out of a black tear in its side, streaming back only slightly toward the stern as water was sprayed onto its superstructure by a fireboat.
What blows had she absorbed?
Chandler wondered.

It was then Chandler noticed that the banter had died down in the locker room. He heard a few people greeting a recent entrant. After the greetings, the room fell virtually silent again but for the sound of running water.

“I mean, there wa'n't a thing you could do,” someone said. “Not one fuckin' thing, man.”

“Thanks.”

Chandler looked back at the front page. A small blurb announced a permanent suspension of the baseball season.

From a new, tentative voice, Chandler heard, “What was it like?”

In the pause that followed, Chandler looked down at the lower
left-hand side of the newspaper's front page. Two articles were set inside a dark border: the day's editions of some special series on the nuclear war. “The Death of Great Falls, Montana” and “ ‘All I Saw Was the Flash,' ” a quote from some guy in Rome, New York. Chandler found nothing about March Air Force Base.

It was the silence that drew Chandler's attention. The room was full of people, and the silence was deafening.

“We were all over the place. Shit was flying off the racks. A coupla guys who were headin' back from the shitter—they went fly-in' too, right straight through the air like they was in space or some-thin'.”

“How'd they get ya?” the first questioner asked gently.

“A recon flight of Foxbats tryin' to sneak in all the way ‘round from the south of Iceland, and along we come, fat, dumb, and happy. We was droppin' Special Forces types out on some old lava fields outside Reykjavik and soon as we went feet dry . . . I had my 'chute on 'cause I was workin' the jump when we started a hard roll. Cap'n Ames musta laid into it with everything he had. A full, wing-over port roll in a fuckin' C-141. You could feel it in your legs, they kinda started bucklin'—and all hell was breakin' loose. I called the flight engineer, and he said, ‘Bandits, bandits!' and then, ‘They got us. Oh, shit, man, they got us.' You could hear buzzers and tones in the cockpit—stall warning, radar threat, everything.”

He paused again, this time for a while. He took a deep, ragged breath. “It was sorta . . . sorta sick'nin', you know, from the Gs. He stood us”—probably some hand gestures, Chandler guessed—“I mean, almost up on the tail. It wa'n't more'n . . . ” He paused, choking on the words.

Chandler—and probably the rest of his audience—hung there, suspended in the air on the huge transport plane. Seconds passed. The missile would have hit by now. Chandler could almost hear the boom.
How loud?
Chandler wondered.
What could it have possibly been like?

“The tail—it just plain blew off. I sorta twisted around to look back. There just weren't nothin' back there. You could look right out at the ground. And
shit.”
The man struggled to continue. Again there was a pause, but then he continued, his voice strained. “Everything was just flyin'
out,
and . . . ”

“Hey, it'll be okay, man,” somebody said.

“ . . . so I just up and jumped,” the storyteller said with a loud, ragged sigh. “I popped the service door and jumped. We was still goin' up, but everything was creakin' and groanin' and the wind was howlin'. I thought about callin' the cockpit, to let 'em know what was happenin', and”—he struggled again—“but, shit, ya know, the plane
was . . . ya know, it was”—his voice faltered again, quaking as he forced himself to finish—“spinnin' sideways like—you never felt anything like that before—and . . . shit!”

Chandler sat there, his head bowed, the only noise the beating of his heart. From the sounds of it, the storyteller was older, some sort of crew chief, maybe. Those were
his
men, and he'd bailed out on them. There was no question among his audience that he'd done the right thing. He knew that but wasn't interested and got no comfort from others saying so. There would be no death of the monster that now haunted his soul.
Those were
his
men, and he'd bailed out on them.

“What do you think's going to happen?” Lisa, Melissa's best friend, asked over the phone as Melissa sat on the sofa, the room lit only by the flickering light of the TV as she gave Matthew his midnight feeding.

“I don't know. They'll impeach him, I guess.” Melissa was practically whispering, but even so she could not hear the commentary that droned on at low volume from her television in the background. She didn't need to. It blasted loud and clear from Lisa's television. One of the last single friends of Melissa and David, Lisa was unencumbered by sleeping infants.

“But they've been in there a long time,” Lisa said. “Who knows? Maybe there's hope yet?”

Melissa held the phone to her ear with her shoulder as she sat Matthew up to burp him. After much work with a breast pump and a free check at a woman's clinic for radioactivity, which would be concentrated in breast milk, she had finally begun breastfeeding. “I thought you hated Livingston.”

“Well, I do. I mean, shit, who doesn't? But, if impeaching him means we go straight to war . . . I mean, you know, with your situation. With David being God knows where.”

Matthew let loose a loud burp and immediately began to squirm. Melissa quickly attached him to the other nipple.

“What was that?” Lisa asked.

“Matthew burped.”

“Oh. Wait! Look.”

Melissa looked at the shaking pictures of the cameras as the reporters ran down the now familiar underground corridor of Congress's
Greenbriar bunker. Over the telephone she could hear the sound from Lisa's television.

“General Thomas! Mr. Lambert!” the reporter was yelling, his voice shaking with each step as the camera approached the elevator banks. “Does this mean there's been a decision?” another reporter asked. “Are you leaving the facility?” a third yelled.

Melissa looked into the faces of the two men who glanced just briefly at the camera before getting on the elevator. They said nothing, their faces stern masks of silence. As the elevator doors shut, a Congressional staffer stepped into the picture from the other side of the cordon restraining the photographers and held out his arms to ask the press to move back.

“Are General Thomas and Mr. Lambert leaving the facility?” a reporter shouted.

“No, no,” the man said. “The Senate has been in its closed session debate now for quite some time. Mr. Lambert and the general are just heading to a conference room for a quick check of the world situation, that's all.”

“How much longer?” several reporters shouted at once. “Hours? Days?” one concluded.

“It'll be some hours yet,” the Congressional staffer said, turning to leave.

“What are you gonna do?” Lisa asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if they impeach him.”

“I still don't understand. What am I supposed to do?”

“I mean, are you going to stick around town?”

“I just got home,” Melissa said, upset at what Lisa was implying.

“I know but . . . if we really go to war.”

“You didn't even leave when the nuclear attack hit us.”

“I was sound asleep. I didn't even know what was going on until the next morning.”

“That's my point. Why evacuate now? You didn't even know it happened last time until you read about it in the paper.”

“My windows shook,” Lisa said, recounting her brush with death. “And when I got out of bed, the water in the pool was rocking back and forth like an earthquake, I swear to God.”

“And you went back to sleep,” Melissa said. “I told you what it was like living in that hotel room. I'm staying right here.”

Lisa fell silent as they saw the scene switch to Europe, where it was already a bright Sunday morning. Melissa stared intently at the pictures of soldiers, looking for David's face. The scene was like that of some disaster—a train derailment, or a massive car pileup. Small
groups of medics tended to men whose bodies were littered all across a road and into a field. “Eastern Poland” appeared at the bottom of the screen.

“Joni and Tom are leaving,” Lisa said. “They're packing everything up in the Range Rover and leaving tomorrow.”

“What about you?”

Lisa didn't answer at once. The scenes on television switched just then to a displaced persons camp on the edge of a war zone. A nurse, wearing full protective gear and gas mask, was adjusting the valve on a drip by a cot on which lay a radiation victim. It was hard to say how old the man was. His hair was mostly gone, and there were red blotches and open sores all over his pale hands and face. The story was about the dwindling stocks of opiates for radiation hospices, and the Food and Drug Administration's consideration of approval of drugs for euthanasia, to be used at the discretion of two concurring physicians and the patient.

“Why don't you come with me?” Lisa said. “We could pack up tomorrow, the three of us!”

“I'm not going anywhere, Lisa,” Melissa said, dejected.

“I don't want to leave without you.”

“My parents are on the way. They'll get a flight out here one of these days.”

“M, are you sure?”

Melissa felt a sinking feeling spread. “David might call.” Lisa sighed. “When are you leaving?”

“I don't know. As soon as they impeach ole Wally, I guess.”

“Will you call before you go?” Melissa asked, tears flooding her eyes.

“Of course I'll call! It may be in the middle of the night, though.”

“I leave the phone on these days,” Melissa said, laughing. Lisa laughed also. Some people slept with radios and TVs on in order to get some warning. Unplugging the telephone was an absurd concept. Melissa looked down at Matthew. He was sound asleep, his mouth open an inch away from her nipple.

When Melissa hung up, she took Matthew upstairs and she put him in the daybed beside her bed and lay down to sleep. After tossing and turning in the quiet room, the only noise the gentle whistle of Matthew's breath, she got up and turned the bedroom television on. It was her only link, and she would leave it on now around the clock.

“I want those flights vectored inbound right now,” Thomas said. “I don't give a damn about German flight controllers. Use our own controllers to keep 'em clear and get them airborne, now!”

“Commandant's office,” the marine said over the phone that Lambert held.

“This is Greg Lambert. Let me speak to General Fuller.”

“Just a moment, sir,” he heard, and General Thomas said into his phone, “How many and when?” As he listened to the response, he mouthed the word “Damn!” and then looked over at Lambert, covering the phone's mouthpiece with his hand. “The Russians just came across the Slovak border—spoiling attack.”

“With ground forces?” Lambert asked as Thomas nodded but redirected his attention to the phone. “Hell, yes, he's got authority to counterdeploy. Yes, he can cross the border. It's go—go, go, go! Execute Operation Avenging Sword.”

“Hel-lo, Greg,” General Fuller drawled, his deep voice dripping the syllables off his tongue.

“General Fuller, the straw vote is in. It's not even close: eighty-six to nine, with two undecided. The Vice President has given the go-ahead.”