Fire (12 page)

Paul Green had looked that NSC man in the eye, and he’d felt himself smile a lot more hungrily than he’d ever meant to where anyone could see. And he’d said sure, why don’t we shoot some of those missiles off? Just to test them out, like, of course.

And he’d thought to himself: Great. Test ‘em out good and proper — nuke one of them Third World places, like maybe Lebanon or Iran, nuke it right down into the Stone Age.

The NSC man had said no, there were treaties the nation had signed. Treaties that prevented above-ground nuclear tests. And besides, there was no part of the country deserted enough in large enough areas — if the missile went as far awry as some of the experts thought it might, it was just conceivable that it could destroy a town, or even a city.

Green thought, Shit — who ever said anything about firing off missiles aimed at this country? He didn’t say anything. The secret he carried in his heart was too big for him to share even a hint of it with some NSC man.

Now, though, there wasn’t any need for secrecy. There was no one left to keep the secret from.

Paul Green had asked that NSC man: what about all those nukes that’ve been in the ground twenty, thirty years? What about them — didn’t they ever work in the first place? Anybody ever test them?

Well, sir, the man said. They were tested, way back when. And they did work. But it’s been twenty years for most of them. And even missiles get old. He made one of them analogies: compared the missiles to a car left sitting in a garage for twenty years. Green knew about that, all right. You couldn’t even leave a car sitting for six months, let alone twenty years. Not if you wanted to go anywhere in it.

A cough, from outside the open door of the situation room. The silence had been so deep and so thick that the sound of another soul nearby startled Paul Green half out of his wits. He only barely managed to keep himself from jumping, and that was good — it wasn’t dignified for a President to act afraid.

“Sir.” A man’s voice; a young man’s voice. It had to be one of the Marines.

“I can’t see you from here. Come on in and talk to me if you’re going to talk, don’t just stand there. Don’t like talking to a man I can’t look in the eye when I have to.”

Green hadn’t bothered to turn on the room’s overhead lights; there hadn’t been much sense in it, what with all the glowing consoles and blinking status lights. All the machines were lit, and more than lit. But there wasn’t light enough to see a man’s face — not properly. When the Marine stepped into the half-dark room his features were so masked in chiaroscuro and red reflected light that they looked . . . satanic.

“Sir, we’ve got to evacuate you to Camp David.”

Is he the Antichrist? Come here to pluck me from my sanctum?

“There’s rioting outside, rioting so bad that there’s no way to hold the people back much longer.”

Herman says that the Antichrist will be coming soon. Why shouldn’t he come first for me? After all, I’m President.

“Sir?” The Marine stepped forward, into stronger, yellower light, and Paul Green saw that he was only a Marine, nothing more, nothing hell-made or terrifying. “Are you well, sir?”

Green sighed. “Yes, son, I’m fine. Don’t worry about this old tiger — plenty of fight still left in ‘im. Now, what’s this about Camp David?”

“We’ve got to evacuate you, sir. It’s too dangerous for you to remain here any longer.”

“Camp David, huh? Well. How about that.”

“There’s a helicopter waiting for you, sir. On the roof.”

“The roof? What the deuce is it doing up there?”

The Marine frowned; the expression made him look even more boyish than he did already. What’re they doing, Green wondered, recruiting a boy that young into the Marines?

“The grounds aren’t secure any more. Sir. The mob has swarmed over the gates.”

Green felt his heart give a little chill. Heathens. Heathens coming for me, waiting for me on my own damned lawn. “Time enough for me to go up and do a little packing?”

“If you have to, sir. Time is extremely critical just now. Sir.”

There were things in his quarters that were personal, but all the things that were dearest to him Paul Green had long since sent home to Kansas. He’d seen this day coming from a long way off.

“That bad, huh? Damn. Okay, then, to hell with that. Let’s get out of here.”

The Marine led him to an armored elevator that Green had never even noticed before. Opened it up with three keys and a magnetic card, and took him to the roof where the dawn was already leaking greyly into the eastern sky. Overhead the helicopter slapped noisily at the air, keeping itself in the air a few feet above a White House roof that didn’t look as though it could bear the thing’s weight. The young Marine waved the helicopter down, toward the surface of the roof. Waved Green toward the machine’s opening door . . .

And Paul Green saw a sight that froze him down into his deepest, most secret heart — chilled and frightened him even more powerfully than the false sighting of the Beast had a few moments before.

As President Paul Green stepped toward the helicopter door, he got a view out over the edge of the White House roof, and for the first time he saw the rioters. No, they weren’t rioters. They couldn’t be rioters. A riot was a different thing completely, something with smaller scope, a thing with infinitely less raw humanity. This, Green thought, was . . . there wasn’t a word for it. Green hadn’t even had a concept for it until the moment he’d set eyes on it.

They want to kill me.

There were thousands of them — no, millions. As far as Green could see the streets were packed solid with writhing human flesh. And Green’s eyes were still good, in spite of his age, good enough to pick out individual faces in the mass. There were honest, decent people out there — people he recognized, for God’s sake.

And they wanted to kill him.

Paul Green was a politician; he’d spent his entire adult life working to earn the trust and love and dedication of these people.

And now they want to kill me. The realization wound its way around Paul Green’s heart, and it killed a part of him.

Where is the Army? Where are the tanks? Someone has to stop these people.

A hand on his shoulder; the young Marine. The man had nerve, Green thought, laying hands on his President. But no, that wasn’t fair. There was no way Green would have heard the soldier, what with the noise from the helicopter so close. And the Marine looked terrified, as though he realized the gravity of what he’d done.

“Okay,” Green said, and then he realized that the man couldn’t possibly hear him, and he nodded. A moment later they were in the helicopter, sailing out and away over the city.

They were five miles from the White House before the crowd down below thinned enough for Green to catch a glimpse of pavement.

“What happened to the Army, son? Don’t they have some sort of a contingency plan for this kind of thing?”

“I wouldn’t know about contingency plans, sir — I haven’t got that kind of clearance. But the word is that most of the bases in the general area are under siege. Maybe as bad as the riot outside the White House.”

“And there isn’t anyone outside Camp David? Waiting for us?”

“No sir. Not in any great numbers, sir. Camp David’s location isn’t quite so public.”

Out to the east the sun was beginning to rise. Green sighed. Camp David wasn’t anyplace he needed to be. Out there he’d be even more isolated from his own people than he had been in the White House. It was time to set the next segment of the plan into motion — time to head out toward Kansas.

“Pilot?” Green spoke loudly, almost shouted, so that the man could hear him through his headphones. “Pilot, what base have you come from?”

The pilot turned, looked back toward him. “Andrews, sir.”

Green felt himself smile. “Andrews, eh? Is Andrews Air Base still secure? Can you get me to Air Force One?”

“Yes sir, Mr. President. There’s some serious trouble at the gates of the base, but no one’s got inside yet.”

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Chapter Ten

IN TRANSIT BY AIR OVER THE EASTERN UNITED STATES

Luke Munsen fell asleep on the flight from Kansas City to New York. The flight was a nonstop — or maybe it was supposed to stop midway through, but couldn’t; Luke wasn’t too clear on that — and there was something wrong with the plane’s ventilation system. Something that made the air inside the cabin warm and thick and stuffy, made Luke too sleepy to keep his eyes more than a slit open.

As he slept he had a dream.

He dreamed of the ashy trilobite that rested in the glass cylinder in his breast pocket. His dream began in the central lab, back at the institute, the laboratory with the smelting furnace, where he’d burned the little creature. At first, in the dream, he watched through his own eyes. Then somehow he was down in there in the hot and dark, and he realized that he was dreaming as the trilobite would have dreamed it. Maybe that should have frightened Luke; certainly he knew what was going to happen to the thing. To him, now. But he wasn’t afraid, just mystified. Fascinated. The heat all around him was new and strange and powerful; the pain that it gave him was seductive and captivating as a lover. And the pain and the heat spiraled toward a more powerful intensity, until the crucible that held him began to glow.

He noticed, then, that his perspective was shifting again; that the deliciously powerful burning was fading from him. He was like a camera at the crucible’s apex. The trilobite was down there below him, on the bottom of the crucible, and it glowed like the brightest ember of a fire. No, it wasn’t a trilobite, not any more. It was . . . something mechanical. Sleek, fire-glowing cherry-red iron, complex and intricate as a design engineer’s nightmare.

Something destructive . . .

It was a bomb. The thing was a bomb. A thermonuclear bomb.

How could Luke know that? He’d never seen a nuclear bomb.

Never mind, he thought. He knew.

And suddenly Luke realized that the crucible was no longer a crucible at all, it was a crimson-burning globe, strange and impossible as a surrealist’s portrait of the world. As he watched the thing that had been the trilobite let loose and exploded in a plasma-cloud of atomic fire.

After a moment the mushroom receded, and the fire was just an ultra-bright pinprick on the face of the globe.

It’s only one bomb, Luke thought. An atomic bomb is bad, but the world can survive one nuclear bomb. It survived Hiroshima, didn’t it? And Nagasaki?

Then he noticed that there were tiny filaments of light spreading out from the explosion, like the strands of a fiery spider web.

And the sound of Luke’s scream was so loud that it woke him from his sleep.

For a long moment after he woke Luke Munsen had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. He was in a high-backed chair with arm rests, dressed in thin-wool slacks and a tweed sportscoat. His shirt and his red-silk tie were sopping with the thick sweat that his dream had pulled out of him. It was day, and the air was cool and fresh the way city air is fresh on a slow day — crisp, clean, ever-so-faintly sour with yesterday’s smog. He was in the cabin of a plane — yes, that was where he was, on the plane that went from Kansas City to La Guardia Airport in New York — he was in the cabin of the plane, only the plane was on the runway and the doors were wide open.

He was the only one in the plane. There was sound, harsh noises made faint by distance, somewhere out beyond the runway.

Luke shook his head, trying to clear it. Trying to make sense of his circumstances. What in the name of God was happening? Planes didn’t land and leave their passengers sitting there, not in the world where Luke had always lived.

“Is anyone here? Where are we?”

There wasn’t any answer. Not that he’d expected one. Luke knew from the feel of the plane that it was empty, but there was no way not to ask it.

He pulled himself out of the seat and stood for a moment in the aisle. He had to get out, figure out where he was. Had they landed in New York? If they had, he needed to find a phone, call Scott Lind — Scott had planned to meet him when he got off the plane, but it wasn’t likely under the circumstances that Scott would even have tried to get to the airport, especially since Luke’s original flight had been canceled. For that matter, Scott probably wouldn’t be able to get here. The best thing, Luke thought, was to get a hotel room. If there was a hotel open and with a vacancy.

First I need to get myself cleaned up, at least half-way presentable — this filthy, I wouldn’t even rent myself a hotel room.

And if he wasn’t in New York, where the devil was he?

He took his suitcase from the overhead compartment, pulled out fresh clothes — shirt, socks, shorts, the navy suit he’d planned to testify in. It was the best he had with him; it would make him look respectable enough, hopefully, to get himself a room even with the situation as it was. Took the clothes to the plane’s lavatory, where the tap — praise God! — was working.

Luke got a look out the plane’s open door when he was on his way back to the seat to get his bags. The plane was in the middle of a runway, at least a quarter mile from a terminal that had seen a lot better days. The airport was La Guardia — over there, almost out of focus in the distance, was the Empire State Building. At the far end of the runway in the other direction was Long Island Sound. There wasn’t any sign on life anywhere in sight; no planes, no traffic on the highway off in the distance, no one on foot.

New York? Deserted? I can’t cope with this. I need to curl up in my seat and go back to sleep.

He actually thought seriously about it for a few seconds. It was a crazy idea. Whatever was going on, it had to do with the President and the nuclear bomb and God knew what else. It wasn’t safe here, out in the open. Even a hotel room wouldn’t be safe, but at least it would be safer.

Luke Munsen should have stayed in that plane — he should have known not to leave. There were clues all around him, waiting for him to see them. The desertion all around. The fact that no one had bothered to wake him. The fact that the pilot hadn’t docked the plane at the boarding gate. The Borough of Queens was so bristling with trouble that it was amazing that Luke Munsen survived even as long as he did.