The Fury and the Terror (6 page)

She was still in a simmering bad mood when it was time for makeup. Then she had what she thought was a wonderful idea.
Anyone
could do bombs.

Ten minutes to eight in the morning where she was. Ten minutes to two EDT in Washington. That gave her a little over six hours until the scheduled press conference, which she had decided to preempt. Workable, Rona decided, smiling suddenly and surprising Daisy, who was about to apply lip gloss with a brush. Daisy accidentally dabbed a little paint at the root of Rona's nose, but Rona was staring past her at the coffered ceiling in the Akohe'kohe Salon of the Presidential Suite, too absorbed in her newly hatched scheme to be annoyed. Her schedule called for her to depart the luncheon at exactly two o'clock. The motorcade would proceed from the grand ballroom of whatever-hotel-it-was (not the hotel in which she was staying) to the air base, where Air Force One waited to fly her home.

Rona knew Portia Darkfeather was the one to pull this off, but Dark-feather was unavailable. And it wasn't something Rona wanted to discuss with her, even in unbreakable code. But Portia, Rona decided, undoubtedly would recommend what's-his-face, the team leader of Designated Hitter. Portia had a lot of confidence in him—Brad, wasn't it?—butch haircut, and one of those faces that was total military hard-on. An ex–Navy SEAL with post-graduate degrees in all types of explosive devices. Thread a needle with an RPG, God she loved those guys!

Brad should still be available, right there in Honolulu. Rona sent for the chief of MORG security on the day shift, then relaxed in the makeup chair with outrigger mirrors that traveled with her and let Daisy finish giving her the transforming works. The portrait of herself she showed the public. Portia would have said she was in default mode again, but screw that. This was going to be fun. And her approval rating in the polls, which had not budged lately after she'd wrung all the sympathy possible from her husband's situation, would probably go through the roof. Even better: she'd have the cover of every newsmagazine in the free world next week. So top
that
, Dumbo.

INNISFALL, CALIFORNIA • MAY 28 • 11:27 A.M. PDT

T
he 922 members of the spring graduating class, University of California at Shasta, had filed into Red Wolves Stadium and were seated in semicircular rows of metal folding chairs on the playing field, mortarboards like a half acre of uncemented blue tiles. They faced the temporary stage erected at the fifty-yard line. Behind them, in the north stands, about five thousand parents, relatives, wives, husbands, siblings, and friends of the graduates had assembled, half filling the concrete arc on bench seats.

Betts and Geoff McTyer were in the tenth row near an aisle. Riley Waring finally arrived, shortly before eleven-thirty, as the Chancellor was concluding his welcoming remarks.

"Did you bring the extra tape for the camcorder?" Betts asked Riley, a little out of sorts because he'd missed the processional.

Riley was a man with heft, homely but pleasing textures. A large animal vet by trade, he had the weathered fortitude of someone who earns a hard and precarious living outdoors. Grand Banks fisherman. Lumberjack.

Riley shook hands, a touch formally, with Geoff, settled himself between them, and unzipped his fanny pack. Opera glasses came out first, then the requested tape that he handed to Betts.

"What've you got there?" he asked Geoff, who was holding his camera in his lap.

"My old Nikon. Bought a new three hundred-mil lens for it. Have a look."

Riley took the camera from him and focused on his daughter, near the end of the first row of academics, clergy, and the Congresswoman from their district, the principal commencement speaker. Eden was seated between the salutatorian, a sixteen-year-old boy of Vietnamese extraction, whom Eden had edged for top honors by .025 of a grade point, and a television actor from a long-running sitcom who was to receive an honorary degree.

She turned her head from listening to a comment of the actor's and glanced up at the crowd. Seemed to be looking their way, a little near-sighted—not enough for glasses, she insisted—probably wondering if Riley was going to show up at all. Riley lowered the camera and thrust a fist above his head, thought he saw her smile, and looked through the camera's lens again to confirm. But the smile had been brief. Eden was poised (it seemed to Riley as he studied her through the telephoto lens) on the edge of her seat; her hands were folded, but tautly, in her lap beneath the golden ropes and tassels that signified her academic achievements.

"Well, she looks"—Riley faltered and glanced at Betts, smiling tentatively—"distracted. Nothing wrong, is there?"

"That we know of," Betts replied, curtly, which made Riley feel as if he'd been left out of something. He handed Geoff's Nikon back to him and made himself as comfortable as possible on the slab of aluminum bolted to concrete. The cheap way to do stadium construction. Only two years old and already lawsuits had been filed, because one side of the stands was sinking, eight inches so far. He'd left the house in a hurry after whipping on a tie, forgetting the stadium cushion that might prevent his hemorrhoids from flaring before they even began to hand out diplomas.

Restless, he glanced at Betts and saw that not only had she remembered her own cushion, she had brought the back rest, like half of a director's chair, that clamped on to the bench seat. Riley sighed. Betts looked at him, already knowing what it was about. The dialogue of a slightly raised eyebrow, a hapless tuck to the mouth, a penitential shuffling of his feet. Betts relented and raised her broad beam, turning her attention back to the field as she did so. Riley reached out and slid the cushion from under her, let his hand rest on her thigh when she sat down again. She caressed his knuckles with her thumb.

The Chancellor, a short tanned man with a vain pompadour like the crest of a Roman general's helmet, introduced the Dean of Students, a man of wit and, thank the Lord, brevity. In turn he introduced the Vietnamese boy, who spoke to the students of learning to steer themselves in journeys to great places. The actor got his honorary degree, cracked a couple of jokes that everyone laughed at because they knew he was a funny man, he had the Emmys and the bankroll to prove it.

Then it was Eden's turn.

2110 HOURS ZULU

"W
hat do you mean, you can't fly the plane anymore?" Darkfeather said to the captain of the TRANSPAC DC-10. "Did your retirement kick in when we changed time zones?"

Neither of the two pilots nor the engineer on the flight deck were amused. Darkfeather remembered the captain's name, or nickname. "Dutch." Captain Dutch van der Veek.

"
TRANSPAC 1850 heavy, this is L.A. Center. Verify flight level and confirm destination
."

The aircraft was descending slowly, Darkfeather was aware of that much. They were just under thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific, 220 miles northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area. Sun glazed the flight deck windows. Outside, in a world of blue, it was fifty-seven degrees below zero.

"L.A. Center, this is TRANSPAC 1850 heavy. We are descending from our assigned flight level at three hundred feet per minute and are deviating from programmed coordinates by zero five degrees right. We are checking GPS and a possible malfunction of R-NAV."

"
Roger, TRANSPAC 1850. Keep us informed
."

The autopilot was a box of instrumentation by the pilot's right knee. Darkfeather glanced at it; saw that the level-change button wasn't armed. Clearly the autopilot wasn't flying the plane. The yokes were moving, slightly, although neither the captain nor the first officer was in manual control. That raised goose bumps on Darkfeather's forearms.

"Can you reprogram the autopilot?" she asked.

The first officer was thumbing through a thick tab-indexed manual. "It's not taking commands," he said.

"Shut it down, then. I mean, pull the fuckin' fuse."

"Dutch" van der Veek held up the fuse in question, smiling tautly. He resumed contact with L.A. Center.

"L.A., this is Captain van der Veek. Can you confirm location of our new waypoints?"

"
Doing that now, Captain. What is your status?
"

"Unable to correct malfunctioning mode control at this time. Also we have been unable to reacquire the controls. We'll try to decouple R-NAV. Meantime, ah, you might want to effect coordination with Seattle Center to divert traffic around us until we rectify our situation."

"
Roger, TRANSPAC 1850. New waypoints indicate Innisfall, California, as your revised destination. Do you want to declare an emergency?
"

"Negative, L.A. Center," the captain said as the first officer reached into a locker for the map book. Darkfeather glanced at the altimeter. They had lost another two thousand feet.

"Hey, Dutch?" Darkfeather said. "What the hell do you call an emergency? Get some expert advice on this glitch. The autopilot's just another computer. Computers don't have minds of their own." The words barely out of her mouth, and she knew. This one had acquired a mind. Kelane Cheng's.

E
den Waring stood silently at the podium on the fifty-yard line. Her head was turned to the west. She watched, for several seconds, a rising airplane, single engine,that had taken off from the runway of the college airport and was turning north a mile from the stadium. She'd had her first flying lessons in that very same plane. She gave the Piper Lance all of her attention.

Someone in the rows of folding chairs tittered. It brought Eden back to earth; she remembered where she was and what she was supposed to be doing there. She smiled edgily and addressed them.

"Chancellor Luzaro, Dean Bettendorf, distinguished guests, faculty, friends, fellow students. Four years have gone by so quickly. And as I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you today—"

Betts, who had let out a long-held breath while Eden was sky-gazing, tensed again when Eden's second hesitation became a stall. The nails of her right hand bit into the back of Riley's hand, and she breathed, "Come
on
, baby. Get
through
it."

Eden touched her forehead as if she was distracted and dismayed by something that had occurred deep in her brain. Behind her, administrators and distinguished guests were looking at each other, concerned that they might have a major embarrassment brewing. But her head came up, and Eden smiled bravely.

"I guess what I really want to say is, we
do
have something to look forward to, friends and f-fellow students, we
can
make things better for ourselves. For all humankind. What we must not do is just give up now and go, oh,
well
, that's the end, America is done for. Nice while it lasted. But they've got us. No way to fight back, the bomb in the baby carriage and so forth. No way to fight the terror that's trying to take us over, slowly squeeze us until we've surrendered our birthright. How many square miles around Portland had to be evacuated? Two hundred? Two thousand? I don't know. What does low yield mean, in practical terms? I don't know that either. I'm a chem major. If the prevailing winds had been from the north, would we be sitting here today? Lucky us. But we're still frightened. Aren't we? The images burn in our dreams. Portland, Portland, Portland. Oh, my God. The firestorm. Kids screaming in evacuation shelters, too charred to touch. You saw it, night after night. I saw it. Too much. We back away. We're Land of the Free,;we haven't been schooled since birth in Balkan-style horrors. Who does this to us? Who dares to believe we will accept it? Better not to think about the bastards. And hope they won't come to us again, with their surface-to-air missiles, backpack nukes, bubonic aerosols in the school air-conditioning ducts, da da, da da, da da whatever. But to pretend is to be afraid. To give in to fear is to lose all hope. I had a quote here somewhere. From Emerson. Can't seem to—but there's no time anyway. We—Excuse me.
There's no time
. Now please just do what I tell you."

In the tenth row of the stands Riley said in amazement, "
That's
her valedictory address?" while at the same time Geoff McTyer whispered dismally, "Lost it. She's buggin'."

Eden's voice, stronger than it had been, echoed around the stadium as she glanced again at the western sky.

"I'm not sure just what it is. But it's coming. Right now. We all have to evacuate, in an orderly fashion—please, just be calm, get up, walk out of the stadium. Go to the other side of the campus. I think—I'm sure that it's far enough away; you'll all be safe there. But go.
Now
."

"Totally wigged," Geoff lamented.

Betts shot him a look, then reached past the stunned bulk of her husband and shook Geoff hard.

"Don't sit there moaning like a ninny. Help her! You're a cop. Use your authority. This is real, Geoff! She's
seen
something. Help Eden get this crowd out of here."

Onstage the Chancellor with the pompadour was trying to steer Eden back to her seat. He was smiling. Great good cheer in the face of her inconvenient nervous collapse. This will just take a moment, folks. Eden the athlete easily pushed him aside, nearly into the lap of the Congresswoman, and rushed back to the microphone. Dean Bettendorf closed in, denying her. Now now now, Eden, why don't you just—Moments of frenetic struggle, hand-to-hand grappling for possession of the mike, which picked up grunts, wordless exclamations, strenuous breathing. The Dean, who had long legs and a high center of gravity, lost his balance. Alphabetized diplomas on a long table were swept to the floor. A couple of male grads, anonymous in a restless sea of blue gowns, raucously voiced encouragement, as if they were at a bar fight. Nearly everyone else in the stadium was tense from apprehension or embarrassment. A child whined in a loud voice. The two cameramen from a local video service who were recording the commencement exercise zoomed in on Eden. A metallic keening from the audio system rent the uneasy air of the stadium and suddenly people were rising everywhere, in a tentative but ominous herd response to the fears Eden had awakened. Portland. Too charred to touch. Coming this way.