Privateers (18 page)

Heading for the liquor, Dan asked, “Can I pour you something? That was quite a speech you gave; I watched you on television.”

Jane sat on the settee next to the curtained window. “What did you think of it?”

“You were incredible,” Dan said, pouring two snifters of brandy. “The country’s flat on its back, so you told them they’ve got no place to go but up. Quite a performance.”

Her green eyes went cold. “You’re being sarcastic.”

Handing her one of the snifters, he replied, “Not really. I don’t think you could do anything else. They all know that things have gone to the dogs. They look to you for hope.”

“That’s right, they do.”

Dan lifted his glass and muttered. “Salud.”

“You’re not in South America now.”

He grinned sheepishly. “I forgot. I’m getting accustomed to the place.”

They sipped at the brandy. Dan made a sour face. “Cheap crap! I’ll have to raise hell with the staff.”

“It’s my favorite brand,” the President said. “Your staff checked with my people.”

“Your favorite? This garbage?”

“Yes. And it was Morgan’s favorite, too.”

Dan felt his face tighten. “He never was much of a drinker.”

“But you are. You’re a man of the world, aren’t you, Dan?”

Better to let that one pass you by, he told himself. Yet as he pulled one of the smaller wicker chairs up close to the settee and sat in it, Dan said, “There wasn’t anything I could do to help. You know that.”

“You could have stayed by him,” Jane answered in a low voice. There was anger in it, even after years. “He needed every friend he had. God knows there were few enough of them.”

“I came to the funeral,” Dan said. “I wasn’t invited, but I snuck in anyway.”

“A lot of good that did.”

He took a long pull on the brandy, despite its acrid roughness, remembering how Morgan preferred raw bourbon to twenty-year-old Scotch, well-done steak to veal cordon bleu.

“So you thought my speech gave the people hope,” Jane said. Her tone was determinedly brighter; she was trying to put the past behind them, Dan saw.

“Yes, I did.”

“And?”

He looked at her.

“Come on, Dan. What else? What do you really think?”

Shrugging, he replied, “You came into office to govern a nation that’s turned its back on its responsibilities. They’ve stuck their heads in the sand, Jane. They got tired of the tensions and the pains of being a world leader. They let their fears rule them-fears of nuclear energy, fears of weapons, fears of war, fears of inflation, fears of taxes …”

“They had a right to be afraid of those things.”

“Sure they did. They had a right to be afraid of the Russians, too. But their other fears overpowered that. Morgan’s predecessors gave our power away, piece by piece. We abandoned Israel. We got out of Latin America. We gave up on nuclear power. We froze our missiles. We let NATO break up.”

“Morgan wanted to change that. The people elected him to bring us back to greatness.”

“They elected him by the thinnest majority since Kennedy squeaked past Nixon. And the day of his inauguration the Russians announced their missile defense satellites were operational, and what was left of our strategic missile force was useless.”

Jane said quietly, “Morgan had his first heart attack that night.”

Dan felt a pang of surprise. “I didn’t know.”

“No one did. Not even the Cabinet or most of the White House staff.” Her green eyes drifted into the past again. “He never really was president. I was, from that very first day. …”

“And now you’re going to stand for election.”

“I’ll win,” she said flatly. The mist in her eyes disappeared.

“I heard a lot of citizens complaining, out there,” Dan said, jabbing a forefinger in the general direction of New Orleans.

She almost smiled. “What else is new? It’s their right to complain.”

“They claim there are Russians in the White House, telling you what to do.”

“Nonsense!”

“But the Soviets do have a pretty effective veto on anything you want to do, don’t they?”

“Certainly not!” she snapped. “This nation is free, and we’ll remain free. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a malicious liar!”

He smiled at her. “Good. That’s the answer I was hoping for.”

“What are you driving at, Dan?”

“A way out of the mess we’re in. A way to help bring this country back to greatness.”

She gave him a quizzical, almost unbelieving look. The United States was not prostrate, they both knew. It was merely impotent. The people’s fear of Armageddon had faded. In its place was America the second-rate power; America the debtor nation; America the coal-burner, who could not afford to buy oil, whose major export was food, who had to import high-technology products such as computers and jet airplanes and electric automobiles; America disarmed, its obsolete nuclear missiles dismantled under the watchful eyes of international inspectors (Russian, Eastern European, and-most humiliating of all-Cuban), its troops mustered out of service, its vast panoply of weapons sold to other nations or left to slowly rust away in the southwestern deserts.

And it was America the unbrilliant, as well. Six years had passed since the last American had won a Nobel Prize. The Brain Drain worked in reverse: bright American scientists and engineers went overseas to find career opportunities. Dan himself had been part of the earliest wave in that flow, seeking work as an astronaut in Japan’s space program when it became clear to him that the United States was abandoning space.

“It’s a little late for your kind of help,” Jane said.

“But-”

“I know what you’re after. You’re going to send a mission out to an asteroid, to prove they can be sources of raw materials for your factories in space.”

He sagged back in his chair, a shock of alarm racing through him.

Jane broke into a smile. “We’re not without our sources of intelligence, Dan.”

He recovered and grinned weakly back at her. “So I see. Congratulations. But if you know …”

“Do the Russians? No, I don’t believe so. There are people who are friendly to us and not to the Russians. You know how the top dog is hated. Now that we’re not top dog anymore, we have lots more friends than we used to.”

Dan kept the smile on his face, but his stomach felt as queasy as the first few minutes in free fall. If she knows, the Russians must know, he thought. Our security isn’t as tight as I thought it was.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Jane was asking. “How can your space mission help the United States?”

“We can leapfrog the Russians,” he heard himself reply. It was almost as if someone else were speaking and Dan was an eavesdropper, listening to the stranger’s speech while his own mind was running through the implications of the breach in his company’s security.

“Leapfrog?”

“They have a monopoly on cislunar space. Everything from the Earth’s surface to the Moon’s orbit is theirs.”

“By UN agreement, they operate-”

“The Treaty of New York,” Dan said. “They shoved it up our ass and gave it a full turn.”

If the President was shocked, she gave no indication of it. She merely picked up her brandy snifter and sipped from it, her eyes never leaving Dan’s face.

“We have the technology to go to the asteroids for raw materials. This mission I’m sending out will prove that. It’ll open up a source of natural resources bigger than Africa and Asia and the Pacific put together. It’ll be the biggest bonanza in human history.”

“And what has that got to do with the United States? We have no space operations at all.”

“But you could have,” Dan answered. “You could establish trading relations with Venezuela, with Japan and China and all the Third World countries. Europe would come in on it, if the States showed enough guts to do it.”

“And what would the Russians do?”

“If they were faced with an alliance that included the States, Japan, China and most of the Third World? What could they do? Not a damned thing.”

The President shook her head sadly. “Dan, perhaps you’re right and they couldn’t do anything once such an alliance was formed. But do you have any idea of what they can do to prevent us from even starting to make such agreements?”

“They could threaten to cut off the last of the oil, I suppose,” he muttered. “Cut food prices again.”

“They could also stop all our electronic communications which are relayed through their satellites,” the President said. “They could seize our overseas assets …”

“What’s left of them.”

“They would get Venezuela to close down Astro Manufacturing.”

“Not if you granted Astro a license to operate out of Hawaii,” Dan said.

“They’d send troops to seize your launch centers, wherever they are. They’d occupy your factories in orbit.”

“Not if we defended those facilities!”

“Defended them?” Jane’s face showed horror. “Do you mean with soldiers?”

“Yes. What else, Girl Scouts?”

“A military confrontation? Then what’s to stop the Soviets from wiping out Washington with a missile? Or Caracas, for that matter?”

Dan suddenly found that he was out of answers. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it? They still have their hydrogen bombs and missiles; we don’t. They don’t have to invade us, or bomb us. Just the threat is enough to make us dance to their tune.”

“It won’t work, Dan,” the President said, her voice softening. “It just won’t work.”

“It won’t work because none of you has the guts to make it work.”

Her eyes flashed. “You want me to risk a nuclear holocaust so that you can make another billion or two?”

“This has nothing to do with money, for Chrissake!”

“Everything you do has money behind it!” Jane snapped. “You left Morgan alone, left your best friend to die, so that you could run off to Venezuela and make more money!”

“That’s not-”

“And now you want me to put the cities of the United States at risk of a nuclear attack. You’re crazy, Dan! Insane! Money mad!”

“I’m sending that mission out,” he replied stubbornly. “Whatever the consequences, we’re going to get ourselves an asteroid.”

“You’re going to get yourself an asteroid. I hope it makes you very happy. I hope it’s made of solid gold.”

“We can make this country great again. …”

“I’m not going to let you endanger the United States,” the President said. “If you want to send a mission to the asteroids, or to Mars, or to hell, for that matter, go ahead and do it. But don’t ask me to help you.”

Dan drained the last of the foul-tasting brandy and leaned over to put his snifter down carefully on the wicker table next to the settee.

Straightening, he asked, “Do you think Morgan would have taken the same position?”

Jane’s alabaster face grew even whiter, like an ice sculpture. But her eyes flamed. “If you had helped him when he needed you, he would still be alive.”

“And that’s the real reason you won’t help me now, isn’t it?”

The President got to her feet. “This is pointless. You’d better go now.”

Dan stood up and realized all over again that she was almost as tall as he, and one of the most beautiful women he had ever met.

“It never worked out right for us, did it?”

“No,” Jane said, her eyes still angry. “And it never will.”

Dan turned and went to the door, his mind already casting ahead to the mission that would reach an asteroid. So the Russians know about it-maybe, he said to himself. And Jane won’t lift a finger to help. But I’m going ahead with it anyway. The hell with them and everybody else. I’m going ahead with it!

“It’s a matter of security,” Dan said. “I want the entire team to stay on Nueva Venezuela until the launch.”

Nobuhiko Yamagata tried to keep his face impassive, but failed. Dan could read unhappiness, discontent, almost misery in the young engineer’s dark brown eyes. They were walking under the hot morning sun at the launch center, crunching along the gravel path from the parking area to the concrete bunker at the edge of the pad where a huge unmanned booster stood massively, like a pillar upholding the sky. A damp breeze blew in from the sea. Both men were sweating freely in their coveralls.

“I understand the need for security precautions,” Nobo replied, his voice serious and respectful.

Dan squinted up at the looming booster. It was loaded with new machinery to replace worn equipment in the main orbital factory. Packed in with the machinery that was listed on the official manifest was the final set of electronics spares and a ton of liquid oxygen for the life support system of Dolphin One.

“Look,” Dan explained, “the Russians probably already know what we’re up to. God knows which of our people around here are reporting to the Soviet embassy.”

Nobo did not show the slightest surprise. He merely asked, “Then why all the extra precautions?”

“Because they probably don’t know when we’re going, and exactly what we’re going to do. And the less they know, the less likely they are to try to stop us.”

“You believe that security will be easier to maintain aboard Nueva Venezuela?”

“We can control all the radio transmissions from the space station,” Dan said. “It’s a lot tighter than here on the ground.”

They reached the heavy steel door of the bunker. As he reached for its handle, Dan saw the agonized look on the young man’s face. He let his hand drop and leaned against the concrete wall, grateful for the scant slice of shade it provided.

“What’s the matter, Nobo?”

“A personal matter. I shouldn’t allow it to get in the way of this mission, I know, but …”

“Who is she?”

His head dropping low, Nobo replied, “Seńorita Hemandez, the one you brought to Sapporo.”