Liberty (16 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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“Yes, sir. Zelda also wants maps from the network companies so she can figure out where we will need to hardwire permanent access.”
“How are you going to get those?”
“Steal them.”
Jake merely nodded. “So what do you think? Will Zelda and Zip work out?”
“As the saying goes, they have issues.”
“Keep me advised. I want them on the job. They're the sharpest computer geeks I ever met, and they know how to cut corners. We need them badly, but don't let them know that.”
“If they haven't figured that out, they soon will.”
“So are you going to take them to their new apartment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pick them up in the morning and bring them to work. This weekend they need to get a set of wheels.”
So Tommy Carmellini took Zelda Hudson, now Sarah Houston, and Zip Vance, now Matt Cooper, home to a one-bedroom, one-bath walk-up in a massive complex. They rode silently, looking at everything, and said not a word.
He drove into the parking lot, stopped, and pointed to the entrance. “You're in twelve forty-one. Elevator's in there. A suitcase with new clothes in your sizes is upstairs, along with the usual toilet items. I'll pick you up tomorrow morning at seven right here.” He handed each of them a key to the apartment. As he handed Zelda hers, he added, “You have a hair appointment in thirty minutes at the salon on the ground floor. Get a cut and dye. Blonde, to match your driver's license photo.” The photo on the license
had been altered on a computer before it was affixed to the license form.
Carmellini took out his wallet, extracted two twenties and a ten, and handed them to Zip. “Get something to eat.”
“This agency money or yours?”
“Mine.”
“Then thanks.”
Carmellini snorted and put the car in gear.
They were standing side by side looking up at the building as he drove away.
The apartment was small, a Pullman-sized kitchen, a living room, one small bedroom, and a bath. The furniture looked as if it had been purchased at a motel liquidation sale; the sheets, blankets, pillows, and kitchen utensils were from Wal-Mart. As Zelda walked through the place inspecting, Zip Vance dropped onto the sofa and kicked off his shoes.
“I wish we were back in Newark,” Zelda said as she stood at the living room window looking at the view, which was of a freeway.
Vance took a deep breath, stretched, then studied his toes. Finally he looked at her back. “This is our chance, Zelda. We can make it work.”
She crossed her arms and hugged her elbows.
“I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison,” Vance said.
“This isn't much better.”
“You measure human lives by the amount of money people have. Aren't you ever going to learn?”
She turned to face him. “I grew up in a dump like this. My brains were my ticket out.” She waved a dismissive hand at the room. “It's like I never left.”
“If you can't see the light, kid, you'll never get out.”
“You're one to talk,” she shot back. “You're right here with me.”
Vance reached for his shoes. “Yep. I fell in love with a woman without good sense, and I wasn't smart enough to walk away. I bought the ticket and I took the ride. The actual number of people who died because we set up that submarine hijacking was six hundred thirty-two by my count.” He looked at his hands, then made a face.
He -tied his shoes and stood. “Redemption, Grafton said! Six-hundred thirty-two people is gonna take a shitpot full of the stuff. Maybe I'll always feel like a total slime. But I'm not going back to the can, not for you, not for anybody alive. Frankly, I'd rather be dead.” He headed for the door. “I saw a pizza joint next door when we drove up. I'll bring you half. Don't forget your hair appointment.”
With that he walked out and closed the door behind him.
Zelda turned back to the window and stood watching the traffic on the freeway. All those cars, all those people, every one of them going somewhere … and she was stuck here.
Jake Grafton got home that evening at 9:30 P.M. Amy was at the library studying and Callie was reading a book. “Let's take a walk,” he suggested after he kissed her.
She looked at her watch.
“I've been looking forward to it all day,” he added. She put down the book and put on her shoes.
When they were out on the street walking along, he said, “I'm going to retire when this is over.”
“Because the president said that the brass felt you wouldn't be promoted? Certainly it isn't
that
?”
“A few weeks ago terrorists belonging to an organization called the Sword of Islam bought four nuclear weapons—missile warheads—from a Russian general. I'm supposed to find the damn things.”
Callie gripped his hand fiercely. “Can you?”
“There's a chance. But I'm going to break most of the
privacy laws in the country. Regardless of whether or not I find the weapons before they detonate, when this gets out—and it will—I'm toast. If I've got weapons in hand, I probably won't go to jail. But any way you cut it I'm done as a naval officer.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“It's time. Nuclear weapons, terrorists, spies, traitors—Jesus, Callie, I'm just a farm kid from southwestern Virginia who wanted to fly airplanes for Uncle Sam. And I've done that. I'm way over my head in scalding-hot water, and I don't like anything about it.”
They walked along in silence hand in hand. After a while she said, “This started with Ilin, didn't it?”
“He's the one who told me about the bombs. The report went all the way up. The president put me in charge of finding the damned things.”
“Why you?”
“That was my question. Apparently he has a sense that something's rotten at the FBI and CIA. I keep getting those vibes, too. It's hard to put a finger on … and yet, I get this feeling that the people in these outfits don't trust each other. Then again, maybe I'm wrong, and it's something else. But the prez is getting bad vibes, too, from somewhere.”
They found a neighborhood bar and went in. When they were each drinking Irish coffees at a corner table, Callie said, “Terrorisms, mass murder—how'd we get to this, Jake?”
“Populations have been exploding since World War Two in rigid societies that can't change,” he said gloomily. “They must change to feed all these new people, and they can't. Or won't. So the pressures build until something pops. Roughly a billion people live in the Islamic societies on less than a dollar a day. Africa is a continent full of those folks. Modern medicine has caused the birth rate to explode, but the people are still ignorant and illiterate, without the trust in each other that holds developed nations together. All those European kings, all those fights
with Parliament and wars and battles for king and country—they were building nations. Never happened in the Third World. We call them nations, but they aren't.”
“The world has experienced exploding populations before,” Callie said, frowning.
“Yes, and war and pestilence have always ravaged mankind until populations were reduced to a sustainable level. Hordes of locusts, epidemics like the Black Plague and AIDS, the Napoleonic Wars, the centuries of strife that occurred in China when dynasties fell—all those reduced the populations to levels that could be sustained with the technology available.”
“Terrorism and mass murder? Are they the modern plagues?”
Jake Grafton rubbed his fingers through his hair, then looked his wife in the eye. “During the Middle Ages in Europe ignorant, illiterate people were manipulated by appeals to the strains of intolerance and fanaticism that are part and parcel of every religion. The Crusades, the popes' wars on heresy, the Spanish Inquisition, the war between Catholicism and Protestantism … all these horrors were committed in God's name. The result was the rise of the secular states, which grew into nations.
“The Muslim world didn't move on—it's still trapped in the Middle Ages. Islam teaches that man should live a life that earns him God's mercy—it's no better or worse than any other religion. Yet the Islamic fanatics are exporting the horrors of the Middle Ages to a developed world that moved on centuries ago. Perhaps this war between religion and secular society is a stage that every civilization has to go through. Maybe it's the only way for a people to gradually learn tolerance, which is the foundation for complex societies that can entertain new possibilities, new visions.”
“The future isn't inevitable, Jake. It hasn't been written yet.”
“I know. I tell myself that once an hour.”
He was sitting on the little balcony of the apartment having a drink when Amy got home a few minutes after eleven that evening. She got a Coke from the fridge and joined him on the balcony. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking at the North Star,” he said, and pointed. “Most nights you can't see it because of the light pollution, but the air is very clear tonight.”
“How do you know it's the North Star?”
“Find the Big Dipper. See it? The two stars at the end of the dipper point to Polaris—the North Star. If you were standing on the earth's North Pole, it would be directly overhead. The stars seem to wheel. around it during the night as the earth rotates.”
“I didn't know that.”
“It's an old friend,” Grafton said. “I got to know it years ago when I was flying A-6s in Vietnam.”
Jake rarely talked about his combat experiences, so Amy led him on. “What was it like, flying up the Gulf of Tonkin looking at the North Star, knowing that in a few minutes the enemy was going to be trying to kill you?”
Jake thought about his answer. “Winston Churchill once said that one of life's most sublime experiences was to be shot at and missed. He was right. We always went in low, trying to get under the radar coverage, so up north they shot like wild men when they heard the sound of our engines. Streaks of flak, muzzle flashes, volcanoes of shells …” He fell silent, remembering.
“One night we were supposed to hit a target southwest of Hanoi, pretty deep in-country. There was a low stratus deck, and our usual tactic was to get down under that stuff and go roaring in at five hundred knots, four or five hundred feet above the ground. That night I had a feeling …” He shrugged, thinking about how it was.
Amy was watching his face, which she could just make out in the glow from the city.
“Anyway, I decided to vary the routine. We went in at about ten thousand feet, about a mile above the stratus clouds. Lord, I never saw so much flak. The flashes from the guns and tracers and exploding shells pulsated the clouds under us, illuminated them like continuous sheet lightning. Then there would be a pause, they would listen for our engines, and everyone would shoot again. The only thing … all that stuff was under us. They thought we were down there, and we weren't.”
“Did you attack your target?”
“Oh, yeah. The BN found it, locked it up, and I dived during the attack. The bombs came off just above the clouds, and I pulled the nose up and did a long climbing turn to go back to the coast, trying to keep my speed up. You didn't want to get slow over the north; they had a bad habit of shooting SAMs at us. They didn't shoot any missiles that night, though.”
“Did you hit the target?”
“No way of knowing. It was modern war, I guess … we dropped the bombs and often didn't know what we hit, if anything. If anyone died. The photo recon guys probably took pictures a day or two later—I don't remember. I do recall that when we got back to the ship that night several other pilots who had seen the show told me that that was the worst flak they had ever seen. They didn't know that we weren't down there in it, so they thought we were real studs. I didn't have the moral courage to tell them different.”
“Who was your BN that evening?”
“Morgan McPherson.”
“Did you like combat?” Amy asked.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Getting shot at and missed—I loved it. But the thing was, you knew you weren't invulnerable. You knew if you kept playing the game long enough, they would eventually hit you.”
“Which made the game exciting.”
“I suppose. They killed Morgan a few weeks later.” He
sighed. “Strange, he hated it and I loved it and he was the one who died.”
He finished his drink, rattled the ice. “When I see the North Star on clear evenings I think of those nights, flying up the Gulf, see the flak again. And wonder if I would still be alive if we had gone in low that night they shot everything they had.”
“Playing the game …” Amy mused. “It sounds like an addiction.”

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