Fire (36 page)

Bill followed the line of his sight, trying to figure out what it was he was looking at. Saw nothing but pine trees and hills rising up around them in every direction. And smelled the salt-wet scent of the sea.

That meant they were somewhere near the coast. Which didn’t tell Bill much, since he’d never been stationed in Korea, and knew next to nothing about the place. He wasn’t even certain he could see it on a map.

“I guess.”

“Yeah. We’d better head in, huh?” Stepped toward the door; set his hand on a science-fictionûlooking silver-green plastic panel. Which must have been a lock of some kind, because a moment after he’d touched it the door beside it clacked open.

It never ceased to amaze Billy, the sort of high-tech tomfoolery that the Air Force would spend money on. He’d spent a lot of time over the years wishing that they’d spent a little more of it on paying airmen a living wage.

Inside the building — it was a bunker, almost — was even more sterile and white than the outside had been.

Directly in front of them was a stairway that lead down. Into the heart of the mountain.

Joey led him down the stairs. Through a couple of doors, and then down again, two more flights. Into a foyer where another airman — security insignia on his arm — waited. This one recognized Joey too. He still made him put his palm on a screwy silver-green plate like the one upstairs. After a moment something beeped near the plate, and Joey led Bill past the guard without waiting for the airman to say he should.

Through a set of double doors, and suddenly the atmosphere was very different. The same walls, the same architecture: institutional. But where the rest of the building’s interior was painted in a harsh shade of blue-white, here the tone was warmer. Easier on the eye. As was the lighting. The only source of light was the strip of fluorescent lamps overhead, but in this hall someone had taken the time to install the sort of fluorescent tube that gives off light that’s easy on the eyes. For a moment — just a moment, mind — Bill almost began to suspect that he’d stumbled into one of those few places in the Air Force where people actually take pains to make the circumstances pleasant. And then it began to sink through to him: there was a reason why they’d gone to that kind of trouble.

The same damned reason why they were buried under thirty feet of dirt and rock and mountain and security.

Because whoever it was who was in command of this operation spent a lot of time here.

Lived here, more likely than not. Buried deep underground at the edge of a war just waiting to start all over again. Hidden so far from the sun that it might as well be the Antarctic.

And no one had to tell Bill that he was going to be buried down here for a while too. He could see that coming already.

It wasn’t a thing that appealed to him. Not by a long stretch.

“This way,” Joey said, turning a bend in the hall. They’d gone what, twenty yards already? Thirty? Far enough that Bill couldn’t imagine that they were still underneath the cinder-block building they’d come in through. He had a momentary vision that they were in an endless maze of tunnels; a catacombs hidden in an exotic place, built especially by and for the United States Air Force. The idea chilled him, which maybe it shouldn’t have, being as he was a part of that self-same Air Force. He shrugged inwardly. Probably there was something in that reaction that he ought to pay attention to. He didn’t have the stomach for it; Bill had had enough of contemplating already that day.

Joey was a good half-dozen steps ahead of him, now, turning again — this time to rap, lightly, on an office door. And open it without waiting for an answer. Beyond him, Bill could see that the hall they were in went on for a hell of a long way. Maybe they were in some sort of a catacombs, he thought — and then rejected the idea again, because it wasn’t something he wanted to think about.

Because Bill was still a good way behind Joey, he heard the woman’s voice from inside the office before he set eyes on her. “Ah! Joseph. You’re back,” she said. Joseph? She had to be talking to Joey. In spite of the fact that Bill had never in his born life heard anybody call Joey Joseph. The woman’s voice was low and smooth, and it wasn’t young. She had the kind of no-accent you hear in people from Iowa or Pennsylvania. “You’ve got the next of them . . . with you?” A small stress, there, on the word them. So faint a stress that Bill was almost uncertain that he’d heard it.

Joey had stopped square in the middle of the doorway, and he still stood there. Bill wasn’t sure exactly why he had, but as long as Joey did there was no way Bill could see the woman without peering over Joey’s shoulder. Which he sure didn’t want to do right at the moment — that was no way to go about meeting whoever it was Joey reported to.

“Sure do, Major. The one from Missouri. Turned out to be somebody I went to high school with.”

And suddenly, listening to Joey’s voice that’d lost so much of its regional flavor — so much of its Joeyness — Bill was wishing that he’d got around to telling Joey about the fact that the Air Force had decided to change his name. If Joey called him by his own name while his papers had him listed under another. . . . It’d be awkward at least. And if he did: would this woman-major know who he was exactly — know what Bill had done on that air field four days ago? Maybe she would. And maybe not; the general back at Whiteman might not have felt there was an absolute need to pass it on.

Which was not to say that there was a damned thing Bill could do about it at this point.

“Well, show him in, Joseph. Don’t just stand there.”

“Oh,” Joey said. He stepped forward and aside. “Sorry. Come on in, Billy.”

And stepped into the room, to see a woman with iron grey hair sitting at a steel desk — the kind of olive-green government-issue desk Billy had seen at least a thousand times since he’d joined the Air Force. His first glance told him that there was nothing outstanding about her; that she might as well have been any other woman who was still in her prime but leaning hard into late middle age.

And then he began to see it.

The firmness of the lines on her wide, sharp-featured face. The — he didn’t know what to call it. Presence was the word that came to mind, but even as he thought it he knew that it wasn’t exactly the right name for the thing. When she looked at Bill, he knew that he was being seen for what he was and what he could have been and what he might have been. And most of all for what he’d done.

And on top of that she was an officer, and not just an officer but a major. Bill wanted to go find an enormous rock someplace, crawl under it and hide for whatever time he had left on earth. Not that that was among his options. He had to introduce and present himself, no matter how awkward that was going to be with Joey there in the room —

And hesitated too long, and she beat him to it, which was very bad form.

“So, Corporal Roe. How was your trip from Missoura?” Which was exactly how she said the name of the state, as though it ended with an a instead of an i.

“Very quiet, ma’am. And a little dull. But it wasn’t —”

“Roe?” Joey was looking at both of them a little cross-eyed. “Who’s Corporal Roe? Major Carver, this is Billy Wal —”

“Hush, Joseph. The man in this room with us is Corporal Theodore William Roe. And if you know him by another name, you can keep that to yourself.”

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Chapter Twenty-Four

WASHINGTON

General Curtis Young stood not thirty yards away from Graham at the moment he began to panic and die again. The General’s nerves were badly on edge — not so much from what was happening as from what wasn’t. Standing on a highway, waiting, threatening, with machine gun and canon aimed at the eyes of civilians . . . it wasn’t work for a soldier. It wasn’t even work he’d wish on policemen, for that matter. For the tenth time in less than a day he wished he’d taken the post in Holland that the Pentagon had offered him two years ago. Europe was still sane — or sane by comparison to this, anyway. The governments over there were still lying low, or the people at the heads of them were, anyway. At least they were still governments. Half the cities in the US had lost their police forces, and not many of those had yet managed to find them again. The fact that Maryland was organized enough to call out its National Guard almost seemed like a miracle. And Congress — Congress was even more of a joke than it ordinarily was. The last Senator anyone had seen was the one who’d got himself pummeled to death by a mob on television Saturday.

The worst thing that had happened to anyone over in Europe was when the two American airmen had got themselves roughed up on leave in Paris.

Definitely, Young thought. He definitely ought to have taken the post in Holland. He shook his head, lifted his binoculars to take another look at the mob.

“Sir?”

It was the lieutenant — the one who was writing the day’s report. Young recognized the man’s voice.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“The report, sir — it’s ready for your signature.”

The mob was quiet, tired-looking. Well, Young thought, it was about time they got tired. Even if these folks had lost a lot of family when they killed the Vice President, how in the hell were they supposed to maintain a riot for days on end? There wasn’t any sense in it. It was time for them all to pack it in, go home, and go to bed. And in the morning they could begin putting the nation back together.

“Anything in there I need to read, Lieutenant?”

“Not especially, sir.”

A sound — someone shouting on the far side of the barricade. In the direction of the Vice President’s body. Young turned, adjusted the view of his binoculars, focused them.

Another shout — this one clear and distinct, understandable.

“He’s alive!”

Young didn’t want to believe that it was what he’d heard. But it had been. It was too clear to question.

Finished focusing the binoculars.

“Oh my dear sweet God,” Young said. “Oh my dear sweet God.”

As he watched the Vice President’s corpse seemed to come to life all at once; the man’s arms flailed wildly, reaching for the cord that he hung from. How can he possibly be alive after all this time? Young could see through the binoculars that the cord had crushed the man’s throat; there was no way he could possibly be breathing, no way blood could possibly reach his brain.

There were men below him, panicked, beating the Vice President with two-by-fours. They looked . . . more surprised and frightened than vicious. As though they were beating the man more from fear of him than because they wanted to kill him.

Young set the binoculars on the portable table beside him. The Vice President was struggling so wildly that Young could see the motion even without the binoculars. “He’s alive, Lieutenant. Wake the men who’re off duty. Get them ready for trouble. We’re going to have to go in and get that man.” He lifted the bull horn from where it lay beside the binoculars.

“Isn’t that . . . a little premature, sir? Shouldn’t we get authorization before we start shooting? Sir?”

Young heard the media people, out behind his men, catch sight of the Vice President and begin to wake up.

“Take the field glasses, Lieutenant — look for yourself. The man’s alive. There isn’t time for authorization. Not if we want to keep him alive.”

“Yes, sir. I can see without them.”

The lieutenant hurried off; Young heard him shouting orders before he’d even decided what he was going to say over the bull horn.

“You there — you with the clubs. Move away from the Vice President. Move away from the man and let him be, and no one else will get hurt.”

They ignored him, of course; Young had expected it. No matter what they were doing they deserved fair warning. More than deserved it: giving it to them was necessary. Bad enough Young was going to have a civilian blood bath on his hands. He didn’t want it on his conscience — or on his record — that he hadn’t tried to minimize the trouble.

“Kill him!” someone shouted. And then there was a gunshot from somewhere in the mob — the sound of a cheap revolver, Young thought. Christ — it was worse than he’d realized. He hadn’t thought that there were any firearms in the crowd.

The bullet missed the Vice President, if that was where it’d been aimed. The three with the two-by-fours were still there, beating on the man, and they were drawing a crowd, now. There wasn’t any time to lose; Young had to send people in for the Vice President now.

“Lieutenant,” he shouted, “send them in. Get that man out of there.”

And the men went in, with their steel helmets and their rifles and their flak jackets.

And the whole world went out of its mind.

As the cameras watched.

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SOUTH KOREA

Bill saw the boy for the first time that evening at dinner.

He was an ordinary child. Happy and healthy; blond and blue-eyed and freckled. Charming the way a child can be without giving it any special effort — or even meaning to be.

None of that, of course, was what caught Bill’s eye.

The thing that caught his eye was the way the boy glowed like a cloud lit up with heat-lightning when Bill first set eyes on him, looking across the room as Major Carver led him in.

Bill blinked, surprised; did a double take, because that was the kind of thing he expected to see when his eyes were playing tricks on him. And sure enough, when he looked at the boy again — looked him in the eye good and slow and careful — he was nothing but a boy. With blond hair. And blue eyes. And freckles.

He’s touched, Bill thought. And wondered where the thought could have come from, because he sure didn’t know anything about being touched or anything like that. Fact was, he couldn’t even have said what the phrase meant. Let alone have thought it.

Touched, said the voice inside his head that was his own voice but couldn’t possibly be him. Said it all insistent like Bill ought to know what it meant.

Well, he didn’t know. And it was dinner time, and he was hungry, and by damn Bill was going to eat. Maybe not all that hungry, actually. But Bill Wallace was a man who liked his dinner.