The Eighth Day (5 page)

200 years ago it must have made sense, but the hard marble steps and floors of the former military academy were killing the Captain’s legs. He calculated that he must walk 30 kilometers a day over these things that were half the rise of normal stairs. The “standard issue” boots he wore as part of his daily uniform were designed for tramping through terrain, not over polished marble. The steps and floors were designed this way so that generals and commanders of the legions of Italy, who once occupied this country, could ride their mounts right up the stairs to their offices. That perk of command was now causing his legs to ache two centuries later. The closest anyone in this compound ever came to a horse lately was a 4x4 Toyota Land Cruiser. The steed-inspired length of each step caused him to hobble up the stairs in a manner not unlike a small boy, with both feet landing on every center-worn tread. This small annoyance piled up to once again have him doubt his lot in life. He had risen to the rank of Captain early, and with pride, only to have his career stalled at that level. Younger men than he were now his superiors. He considered himself a glorified office boy running antiquated Teletype messages, deemed secret, to various parts of the massive military structure. It was that level of sensitivity, which demanded that no underling, beneath the rank of Captain could ferry these signals to the Command staff. He hurried past statues of great former generals and busts of other old men whose bones were now dust, those marble effigies keeping them in eternal service to a country that had been occupied more times than a hotel room in Paris.

He stopped at the desk of the assistant to General Nandeserra. The Captain hated the General’s clerk, who had adopted an air of royalty, simply because he was the lackey of a commanding officer (an elevation in life to which his goat herder of a father could never have imagined).

“Is he in?” the Captain asked flatly.

“He’s busy,” the little snit replied.

“It’s a communiqué.”

With an almost disgusted sigh, the aide laboriously lifted the phone and buzzed into the inner office. “Captain Falad, with a telex.”

As he entered the room, Falad was surprised to see 10 high commanders in conference around a map of the United States. There were pins inserted at various places, one in a place called Ohio. He stood waiting to be recognized as the men discussed something about the effect on their plan.

“So, are you saying that the Americans won’t look this way?” General Nandeserra asked in an accusatory tone meant to belittle any opinion that didn’t originate within his brain.

“I am saying, General, that they have established no links or any connection to us or Samovar.” A slight-of-build, mustached Colonel, in an ill-fitting uniform, explained.

Falad surmised that he must be in the intelligence service, since intelligence officers were not warriors, just brains. The army could make a uniform fit the body of a man of action, but could not make a dress shirt for a brain.
Brains
, Falad thought,
required a private tailor.
He noticed the copy of an intelligence report; it was in Arabic but the words “Canton Ohio,” which had no Arabic translation, remained in English. He then heard Nandeserra mutter, “Yes.”

Falad stepped forward, put his feet together, as is appropriate when addressing an officer of flag rank, and handed the papers to him. The General put on his half-height reading glasses and gave the paper a quick scan, “That will be all, Captain.” He dismissed Falad without looking up from the Teletype impacted paper.

As the Captain headed for the door he heard the General announce, “It appears the Americans do not have any idea that they are under attack, at least from the disposition of their military assets in the world. There has been…” the door shut behind him, cutting off the General’s words.

Falad walked across more than 1,000 meters of unforgiving Turkish marble back to his desk in the basement. Falad was stationed in the “Eyes and Ears,” the nickname he and his unit called the modern listening post that was finally approved for installation. It was really nothing more than a few satellite dishes with K-band receivers hooked up to a distribution system that allowed for many television sets along with many video tape recorders to monitor worldwide satellite broadcasts. It was crammed into a small space amidst the clanking metal Teletype machines that still carried encrypted communications to various levels of the government and military.

Ever since the Gulf War of the last century, nation states of the world realized that much intelligence was flying around the globe in the form of satellite news networks like CNN. Critical information regarding operations, troop movements, and the future deployment of forces were the common fodder of American journalism. Falad estimated that America’s lust for news had saved nations around the world billions in intelligence gathering costs. Having lived for a short time in the U.S., Falad was well aware of the open nature indicative of that society as well as its puppet governments throughout Europe. That’s how he got this assignment. To his chagrin, he was pulled from an active field artillery unit on the western border only to shuttle papers and culturally interpret the programming they were receiving.

America had made a sport of political and governmental news coverage. They just couldn’t help themselves from broadcasting these matches to the rest of the world. Falad had been brought in to separate the dung from the fertile soil. There was much dung on these programs. People, who had no idea of what was truly going on in government or military affairs, were given airtime and the privilege of discussing pressing matters of the day with anchors and hosts of talk shows. For the most part, those moderators’ only apparent reason to exist was to fill up the spaces between Weight Watchers advertisements and recorded music offers. This massive amount of uninformed guessing and supposition was confusing to standard, direct translators. It became clear that “who was talking?” and “what true knowledge did they have?” were more cultural questions than ones of fact. Many horse’s asses were allowed to pontificate on matters of the day, essentially polluting the well of information which was originally so pure when Peter Arnett broadcast direct from Baghdad. One could plainly see, in night vision green and white, the air war happening over his shoulder. Today 90 percent was garbage and people speaking merely to hear themselves talk. Falad’s job was to monitor, decipher, and rate the relative importance and political power of the various heads that spoke so that the “intelligence” they spewed could be either dismissed or considered.

Getting the hang of the White House could certainly be a daunting task; her level of security pass clearance had its limitations unless a senior person accompanied her. The first thing she learned was that Hiccock had “All Access.” He seemed to have a direct line right to the president, a truly rare circumstance between a science advisor and POTUS, which is what she learned the insiders called the
P
resident
O
f
T
he
U
nited
S
tates. It was a carry over from the abbreviation used on the old White House interoffice phone system.

She thought she was heading down to the White House mess when she found herself in the little room, off the pressroom, filled with reporters filing their stories. The United Press International correspondent immediately zeroed in on the blonde as she entered the room, appearing somewhat bewildered.

“Can I help you?” Dave Higgins asked.

“I can’t believe I wound up back here,” Carly admitted out loud.

“New here, aren’t you?” he asked seeing the special badge hanging from her neck. It was a “short term” issue, usually for reporters whose newspapers didn’t have a permanent reporter assigned to the press corp.

“Yes, my second day.” She extended her hand. “Carly Simmone from
Scientific American
.”

“Dave Higgins, UPI. Want a cup of coffee?”

“Actually, I was heading to the mess for an interview.”

“Ah… that’s the next door over, then make a left.”

“Thanks.” she turned to leave.

“Who are you interviewing?”

“William Hiccock.”

“Right,
Scientific American
!” he made a gesture with his finger like a gun and shot her a wink. She reciprocated, shot him back a pressed grin, and left.

It took all of five minutes. Wally Smith, the producer of MSNBC, found his way into Naomi Spence’s office.

“What can I do for you, Wally?”

“Naomi, we all play by the rules here. You say hands off Hiccock and we back off.”

“Thank you for reminding me of my own rules”

“…Well today this girl shows up with a special, and Dave Higgins tells me she’s having lunch with Hiccock, doing an exclusive egghead piece for
Amer
i
can Science
magazine. What gives?”

“First off, it’s
Scientific American
. Secondly, she is not a girl, she is a woman, a reporter, and, for your information, the story was set way before anything blew up.”

“Listen, Naomi, I represent over four million viewers. Throw in NBC and CNBC and we got 30 million adults 25 - 54 watching. I don’t think I like the idea of being scooped by some monthly journal of a science rag, when we are covering hard news here.”

“Yesterday you did a seven-minute package on the president’s daughter Marie’s poodle and how she got better doggy health care being the daughter of the president. Real hard there, Wally”

“So that’s what this is about, revenge for a little human interest?”

“The only thing human about that piece was the cute shot of the dog, Wally! Otherwise you were going for PoodleGATE.”

“You know, Naomi, when we were back at 30 Rock, you understood how tight this business is…”

“Stop right there, Wally. We worked together back in New York 15 years ago. You have cashed that chip more than a few times, and now it’s done.”

“You can be so infuriating.”

“My husband tells me that all the time.”

“How’s Larry doing?”

“The doctors say as long as he walks the straight and narrow, his kidneys will be with him ‘til we own a place in Miami.”

“Say hi for me, and think about what you are going to do to make this up to me.”

“Up yours, Wally. I’ll tell him you said hello.”

“See ya round, Spence.”

“See ya round, Wal.”

As soon as he left, Naomi called her assistant. “Sue, pull the
Scientific American
file. I want to see last month’s request for access letter one more time.”

“Do you ever regret not playing in the NFL?” Carly asked a half-hour into her interview with Hiccock.

“I never connected with football the way I have connected with science. Football was a game, a diversion. I have always been a scientist.”

“Are you just saying that because we are doing a
SciAm
article right now?”

“No, I told the same thing to
Sports Illustrated
.”

“When?” she asked. “I didn’t see any article from
S.I.
in my research.”

“Exactly. I told them the same thing I just told you. Took all the fun out of it for them, I guess.”

Carly was smiling. “So then you learned from
that
, what to say to me?”

They both laughed.

Wally Smith was getting a cup of coffee when the laughter turned him around. As he looked at this
girl
, this blonde, very attractive blonde, with a great smile… he felt inspired.

THERE THEY ARE, right where Walter said they would be.
Rusty and filthy, enough to beat the band, but they will do
, Martha thought as she put the jumper cables into the backseat of the car. She returned to the garage and opened an old, dusty Army footlocker. She was inundated with the intense smell of mothballs. Again, there where her dear departed Walter left it, tucked under the heavy brown cloth of his sergeant’s uniform, lay his illegal war prize. It was still oily, situated next to a magazine. The magazine held nine bullets. When inserted into the German Luger, it would be transformed from a dead war relic to a deadly weapon.

She shut off the light in the garage and went out to her car as the setting sun drew long shadows on everything in her quiet little neighborhood. Walter needed her. Soon she would see him again and help him with the dead battery in his car.

Mr. Quimby was watering his lawn when he noticed Martha backing out of her driveway cautiously. “Eh, Martha,” he called out across the picket fence that separated these neighbors for thirty-five years. “Going to the grandkids?” He chalked up her lack of response to the widow Krummel being hard of hearing of late. As her taillights disappeared around the corner, he turned back to his meticulously manicured lawn. The last few days of Indian summer had been brutally hot and that meant lawn-browning weather if one wasn’t careful. Maybe he would water Martha’s as well.

She drove as dusk turned into darkness. When Martha got sight of the highway sign for the Waukesha Gap, new thoughts filled her brain. Her eyes fluttered momentarily, causing her to refocus on the dirt road and a farm stand just ahead. Making a left-hand turn onto the service road, she thought,
big juicy strawberries will make an excellent jam.
She followed the bumpy and dusty road for eight miles.

This was an access road for the railroad’s right-of-way maintenance crews. Ahead of her, lit by her headlights, she could barely make out the two big metal cabinets that sat on concrete footings alongside the track. As soon as these cabinets came clearly into view, new thoughts filled her head.
There is a little baby in the big cabinet crying for its mother.
She shut the engine off but left the lights on as she retrieved the jumper cables, crowbar, and a big old flashlight and made her way toward the control boxes. Her nose twitched from the pungent odor of creosote, a petroleum derivative with which the wooden rail ties were saturated. Not remembering how she knew this, she recalled that this tarlike goo was meant to dissuade termites and mushrooms from making homes in the vital wooden cross members.

Using all her effort, she managed to pry open the small hasp lock on the bigger panel. She then placed the crowbar on top of the smaller cabinet along with the Luger. After positioning the flashlight on the ground, the tiltable head pointing up at the box, she opened the cabinet. For a brief moment, she was befuddled by a wave of fear washing over her. Then, as quickly as it came upon her, it was gone. With the confidence of a veteran track-and-signals railroad man, she traced the circuitry, her hand hovering just above the copper-clad contacts and relays. She identified her first contact point and clamped one end of the jumper cable to it. She attached the other end of the cable a foot to the right and about four feet lower, which sent sparks flying. A solenoid began to clank as relays flipped.

Three hundred feet down the track, a switch machine cycled through its positions, first sliding the rails left with a metallic clunk, then slamming right back to the original position. Lights on a signal bridge above the switch followed suit, going from green to red and back to green. The lights on the dwarf signal beside the track alternated in an “L” configuration, first one over the other, indicating straight through, then side by side: turnout to the left. At this point the switch machine threw the rails left again, but this time the signal did not turn red. It stayed green. As the rumble of an approaching train echoed through the valley, Martha walked precariously down the track along the sloping loose-gravel roadbed to a point in front of the signal bridge. The dwarf signal displayed two lights, one on top of the other, indicating that the switch was set for straight ahead. She made sure the light was set on green and turned her back to the white fog created by the glow of the oncoming train’s headlight. As she walked back to the control boxes, two tracer-like bands of light raced toward her, the reflection of the train’s powerful headlight, first seen off the stropped-steel 155-pound main line rails, as the locomotive came around the bend and into view.

Having completed her task, a slight shaking overcame her body. She felt conflicted over the thing she knew she must do next. With a sense of dread welling up from somewhere deep within her, she turned and approached the cabinets again. She watched in stunned silence as her hand extended out into the night, on its own, reaching for something. The flashlight on the ground in front of her shone in her eyes, which darted to and fro. This degraded her night vision so much that, as she reached for the Luger, she smashed her head right into the crowbar she didn’t see. The old woman staggered, falling to the ground in the gap between the control cabinets.

Unconscious, with a deep gash in her forehead, her last thought was of her husband Walter, who died twenty years ago.

Train 7210, its consist made of only tank cars, was high-balling through the flat valley at sixty miles per hour. The lead engine, running short hood forward, being a General Electric C40-8W, was known on the road as a Dash 8 Diesel. It was coupled with four other Dash 8s, which gave her a combined pull of 20,000 horsepower, enough to pull the eighty cars across the country. Two additional locomotives, older Dash 7s, were hitched to the rear of the train and served as helpers in a push-pull arrangement that generated an additional 2,250 horsepower each, enough power to climb up and over the Waukesha Gap. Jim Crowley, a third-generation railroad man, was at the controls. One of his last living actions would be to ease his grip on the brake handle when coming around a banked-curve section of track at full speed. He did this secure in the fact that the signal at the Waukesha interlock was “clean and green.” The vertical lights of the dwarf signal indicated the switch was set for the straight. At seventy miles per hour, the two miles of arrow straight track ahead gave him just under two minutes to bend over and get his thermos to cut the chill of the night with some hot coffee. But before he was able to grab the thermos, his cab jerked suddenly, veering hard left as his engine raced over the thrown switch meant to be taken at five miles per hour.

He was already dead from his head slamming into the throttle pedestal before his body crumpled to the floor. The half-ton wheels of the engine ripped through the frogs and railroad ties that made up the track-and-switch roadbed. Pandrol clips, which long ago replaced spikes, popped and sprung from the cleats below the rail. The massive force of the millions-plus tons of tank cars coupled behind it pushed the engine like a plow into the dirt as the other engines began to jackknife. With the pneumatic brake lines leading from the engines to the rest of the train severed, the cars had no way of slowing down and proceeded to derail and collapse, spilling their liquid contents out onto the countryside. The ruptured tanks were ignited by the sparks flying from the grinding metal, setting off a hundred fires in the vegetation and bramble along the right of way. The faster conduction of sound through the steel rails made each cry of bending steel and groan of folding iron sound as if it were a spring twanging underwater—the kind of pre-echo that one usually only hears in monster movies. It took a full minute for all the cars to come to a moaning, squeaky halt or to randomly explode. When they finally stopped, a quarter mile of devastation and destruction lay strewn about the woods of Waukesha Gap.

Amazingly, Martha had fallen between the two concrete footings, and the engines and cars piled up away from where she lay. Rescue workers were astonished and confused when they found her there three hours later.