Arc Light (30 page)

“Yaderniy vzryv!”
Lambert heard shouted in the background. “Nuclear detonation,” Lambert translated in a quiet voice for those in the room.

General Starnes read from his computer printout. “Saratov Domestic Airport,” he said in a low voice, and made a notation on the computer paper after looking at his watch.

“Mr. President, it goes against every fiber of my body to trust you after the attack that you are conducting against my country and my people. As a Russian, as a patriot like yourself, I feel an outrage at the senseless destruction that your gross overreaction has wrought upon the innocent. General Zorin's orders were issued by mistake. Yours, sir, are quite intentional.” General Fuller snorted, looking angrily from face to face around the table.

“I have given you my word that the war is over,” the President said. “May I have yours?”

There was a long pause. “If what you say is true, if your forces are in fact withdrawn from the field and assume a nonthreatening posture, then I will give the forces of the Republic of Russia similar orders to stand down. As I stated, Mr. President, and as I pledged to you in our last conversation, we have not conducted, and will not conduct, if you keep your pledge, further hostile action against your country.”

An air force sergeant came into the room carrying a handful of papers. “All right, then,” the President said, and Lambert motioned the uncertain man over and took the papers, “let us plan to talk again in, say, twelve hours' time. By then our good faith should be evident.”

The air force sergeant leaned down to whisper to Lambert. “We picked up a local broadcast station from Seattle. The Vice President's speech is in a couple of minutes, sir.”

“Patch it in here, if you can,” Lambert whispered back.

A pop over the speakerphone indicated Razov's undiplomatically
abrupt disconnection of the line. “Well, what do you think?” the President asked. Lambert looked through the papers. They were a telecopy from Mount Weather. He looked at the second page. “Draft of address by Vice President Costanzo,” the heading said.

“Excuse me, sir,” Lambert interrupted just as the single screen in the room lit and the lights were dimmed slightly. “They've just picked up the signal for a television station that will broadcast the Vice President's speech, and this draft of it just came in.” He handed the fax to the President.

As the television signal wavered and was tuned almost constantly to achieve a barely acceptable signal, which showed an empty podium with two American flags standing in the background, the Secretary of Defense asked, “What's he going to say?”

Putting on his reading glasses and turning to the first page of the speech, the President said, “He's going to tell everybody not to worry, that the government is still functioning, that . . . ” The President grew silent, and Lambert and the others looked from the screen to see the President rise slowly to his feet as he read with a look of astonishment on his face. “Oh, my God,” he said.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice of an off-screen announcer came from the speaker amid hissing static as Paul Costanzo took the podium, “the Vice President of the United States.”

“This perfidy, this unparalleled evil, this sin of biblical proportions will not go unpunished!” The drama in the Vice President's voice gripped Melissa Chandler, her attention focused on the hotel room's television. “The men and women of our armed forces stand ready to take up their arms and go forth, seeking justice from those who have committed this crime! They stand ready to lay down their lives for the cause of peace, that the scourge of nuclear weapons might never again blight our planet! But if, God forbid, the gates of hell are ever again opened to loose the flame of nuclear war upon mankind, I for one say: let it not be
our
bowed and bloody but unbroken nation that is blackened or
our
people whose lives are lost!”

There were no crowds, no applause, but Melissa could feel the tingle as the words achieved their intended effect. “Let me quote a great man who led this nation through its last great trial. Many years before assuming the highest office in the land, Abraham Lincoln had this to say about the fortitude and capacity of our nation: ‘At what
point shall we expect the danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?
Never!
All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth . . . could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. . . . If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.'

“Last night was a night of infamy, but the days to come shall be days of glory, and this nation of free men and women will prevail and, by prevailing, rid the world of the Russian menace once and for all. This nation, our great United States of America,
shall
live through all time. We
shall
meet our enemy on the field of battle, and we
shall
prevail! Every generation has its great cause. Join me in this one. Take up the banner, rise to fight our enemy as one nation, and no force in the world can stop us! Good night, my fellow Americans, and God bless the United States of America, and the success of her armed forces!”

As the scene faded and the camera focused on the crossed American flags behind the now empty podium, Melissa's eyes filled with tears. She sat on the bed by her sleeping baby, steeling herself to deal with the war that was sure to come, the war that her husband, if he was still alive, would have to fight but that she would have to endure.

After returning from the open-air mess, David Chandler sat in the crushed grass of the low hills by the tarmac and unzipped his heavy camouflage bag. He still ached from the unpleasant attempt at sleep on the ground the night before and from the day of hard work unloading supplies, digging latrines, and other jobs involving manual labor in which he had joined his men but to which he was unaccustomed. Inside his bag, however, was the still unexplored world of goods acquired for him by Master Sergeant Barnes, and he wanted to get through it before dark.

On top lay a field jacket, gloves, sleeping bag, flashlight, knife—a bayonet actually. He could not imagine the situation in which you would ever attach it to a rifle like the M-16. Most likely, if you crossed rifles with the M-16 in hand-to-hand fighting, its plastic stock would crack, and if the crack were in the butt, the spring
that dampened the rifle's ferocious recoil would catch. The result: probably a radical dislocation of your shoulder the next time you pulled the trigger.
Thank you, U.S. Army,
he thought sarcastically as he pulled out more of the goodies. Miscellaneous stuff: a poncho, water purification tablets, first aid kit. Barnes must have been the best customer the quartermaster at March Air Force Base had.

March Air Force Base,
he thought, sitting and looking out at the men and women who dotted the low hills around him, brushing their teeth or shaving, seemingly much more comfortable than he with life on the land. It was gone, March Air Force Base, and all who had been there.
Melissa,
he thought, and shook his head, chasing away the thoughts. She was fine. She would be at home right now, and her friend Lisa or her parents or somebody would be staying with her as she waited to deliver their baby.
She's fine,
he repeated to himself.
She's fine.

Chandler pulled out the webbing. He had tried to tell Barnes gently that he didn't think he needed the full load the others carried. “Well, uh—I'm gonna be on staff, ya know?” Chandler had said. Stifling a grin, he pieced the pistol belt and padded suspenders together.
Playing dress-up,
he thought,
just to satisfy the army's idea of what a soldier should look like.

He put on the belt and suspenders—his
ALICE
, or All-purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment system—and searched on. Canteen, pouch with compass, two ammo pouches for the four thirty-round magazines. Chandler mounted those, together with the folding shovel—an “entrenching tool”—with its own holder, the bayonet in its scabbard, and the first aid kit onto his
ALICE
. They were all standard—what the army calls a “fighting load”—but Chandler felt strange with all of it hanging from him as he stood up for the first time.
Gotta keep up appearances for the locals,
he thought as he saw the chow line and the old ladies from Gander who had volunteered to come out to help the stranded American soldiers.

He returned to the big bag and pulled out an empty field pack. It carries the “existence load,” Chandler recalled, mouthing the words as he continued his private tutorial in the relative seclusion that his status as major seemed to buy, the enlisted men and women feeling more comfortable steering clear of him.
The existence load would go on over your
ALICE
—carry extra ammo, water, rations, clothing, sleeping bag, et cetera.
Chandler noted that Barnes had gotten him the “medium,” his one concession to the staff officer.
Hell of a thing to call a pack that weighs fifty pounds loaded,
he thought. He knew, however, that it was twenty pounds lighter than the infantrymen's “large.”

He slipped it off and sat, peering back into the verdant world
of new belongings still inside the camo bag. There was a helmet. He had felt increasingly naked without one as the day wore on—the sight of a bare head growing rare as the sergeants whipped the privates and corporals into some sort of order and the gear more and more appearing in their proper places on the soldiers' bodies. He lifted the helmet out. Standard new issue, covered with the ubiquitous camouflage cloth, the new shape Kevlar helmet that sweeps low over the ears and around the back of the skull. He adjusted the liner inside to fit and left it on his head to continue his search through the bag.

Chandler had thought the brown cardboard box of MREs that he saw next was the last of it. Almost lost at one end of the green bag, however, was a large, flat object.
What the hell's that?
he wondered. He tugged on it, then reached in with both hands and pulled it out.
Body armor—a flak jacket.
Melissa had specifically asked him about it on the car phone before he got to March.
Would I get a “bulletproof vest”?
He hadn't known. “Probably,” he had amended after the silence from her end of the line grew. “I want you to get one,” she had concluded, but he really had not known whether they would be issued.

Body armor. Melissa had thought it almost magical in its protective powers. Chandler had not told her of its limitations. It could stop a pistol bullet, probably. Break a rib, knock you down and the wind out of you, but not kill you. The problem was, nobody carried pistols anymore. Military body armor was intended to prevent wounds due to shrapnel, whose irregular, nonaerodynamic shape limited its velocity and penetrability. But not a high-powered rifle bullet of a modern assault rifle or machine gun. No way, not even close. Instead, it would flatten and distort the bullet's jacket on penetration, slowing it from thousands of feet per second to hundreds, transforming energy from potential into kinetic and discharging the force released into your body. That, he recalled from school, was a bad thing. Force equals mass times velocity squared.
The velocity's the trick.
Chandler thought.
And not only would the bullet knock the holy shit out of you, the bullet would enter dirty, its shape smashed or even shattered or splintered.

No, Chandler decided, if you were going to be hit by a rifle or machine gun bullet, better not to wear the armor. Better to just get it over with—in and on through—with as little disturbance to the projectile and therefore as narrow a “trauma channel” as possible. Maybe it would keep spinning, not tumble, and go through soft low-priority tissue like muscles and fat, and not hit organs or a bone and ricochet around inside. That way it would exit with all of its speed—its potential energy—intact to waste on something else. Somehow
it made him feel better to think of such perils. If he were the one in danger—if he, not she, were the one at risk—then all was right with his world, and he could concentrate on his own problems. Like what to do with the two hundred odd men and women from his flight.

Chandler put all of his new gear on and then stood and took a little half jump, the various metal parts of his load sounding like a symphony of clacks and jingles. It felt awkward and odd, but he was satisfied that the pack stayed in place pretty well.

Master Sergeant Barnes appeared out of nowhere and asked for Chandler's canteen. He took it and left, he said, to fill it to the cap from the Gander fire department's tank truck, which was providing their water. To prevent noisy sloshing, he had indicated by shaking the half-empty canteen. While he was gone, Chandler put the body armor on and it fit well. He readjusted his
ALICE
and put it on and donned his helmet to adjust the chin strap. He felt Barnes replacing the now full canteen onto his belt and turned to see the man peeling some dark green tape off a roll with his thumbnail. “Just a sec, sir,” he said, beginning a process that involved fifteen minutes and a half dozen little jumps in the air after each of which Barnes attempted to reduce the symphony of sounds emanating from Chandler's equipment. Half the roll of tape later, Barnes ended up taking the pack from Chandler to “sorta rearrange things a little.”

“You tryin' to turn me into a Ninja, Master Sergeant Barnes?” Chandler laughed, relieving himself of the heavy load of equipment. Barnes just smiled.