Arc Light (32 page)

“I am not at liberty to discuss the matter on the ground that it might compromise the national security of the United States during the pendency of a defense emergency.”

“You realize, don't you, sir,” a Republican Congressman said, “that you are subject to the penalty of criminal contempt.”

Lambert nodded, and the senior Congressmen conferred behind the chairman. Finally, the chairman said, “Mr. Lambert, we are going to dismiss you pending recall after a resolution of the legal issues involved. You are instructed to remain available for recall on short notice.”

Outside the hearing room, Lambert ran into General Thomas.

“Hello, Greg,” the general said, motioning Lambert over to the side. “They called me down here for a briefing on the war, or conflict, or whatever we're supposed to call it.”

Lambert gave the general a slight nod.

General Thomas put his hand on Lambert's shoulder. “Greg,” he said in a compassionate voice, “I'm sorry—I just heard.” Lambert nodded again. The two were silent for a moment before Thomas said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I need to find her,” Lambert said, suddenly very agitated by the possibility. He looked at Thomas. “It's pretty hot down there, Greg.”

“There are people working inside the contaminated zone,” Greg protested.

“In shifts, flown in and out quickly in protective gear.”

Lambert looked up at General Thomas. Thomas stared back for a moment, straight into Lambert's eyes, and then nodded, saying, “See Colonel Rutherford. He'll arrange it.”

“Thank you,” Greg said, his head heavy, his eyes dropping again to look at the floor.

“Greg,” General Thomas continued, his voice a little sterner this time, “you can grieve, if the worst is true, but you can't blame yourself. You had a job to do that took you away from home like millions of other men and women, and—”

“She drove a Saab,” Greg said, his lower lip quivering like a child's. “She kept telling me that . . . that the engine temperature light came on. I was working such long hours that I put off taking it into the shop. She never would, because she was timid about car repairs, things like that.” He swallowed back the tears, batting his eyes and looking up and off into space. “She . . . uh . . . called our answering machine on her car phone. The engine had overheated on the way to the mountains. She was already sick,” he said, breaking into tears. General Thomas wrapped both arms around the taller man, his own eyes watering as they hugged.

The crates were heavy. Lambert's back hurt after the first one, and the sticky feeling he had felt since putting on the chemical-biological-radiological gear—charcoal-impregnated outer garments and gas mask—had turned into a drenching sweat.

As he and the army helicopter crewman hefted the last of the heavy crates to the similarly dressed men who had dashed out the door of the Pentagon into the interior courtyard's helipad, the crewman turned to the cockpit and gave the thumbs up to the pilot.

The military had insisted on dropping off the supplies to the staff of the Tank, the sealed war room on the third floor of the Pentagon, before proceeding with the “secondary mission.” Now, however, they were Lambert's, and it was a race against time. The swirling downdraft of the rotor blades had coated them all in fallout
radiating thirty roentgens per hour. A cumulative dose of two hundred roentgens killed some humans, and six hundred would kill almost anybody. The clock would continue to run until they got back to the decontamination site outside Dundalk, Maryland.

As they climbed to a thousand feet over the still city, Lambert noticed the army crewman in back watching him. He'd heard the crew's bitching when they received their orders, but was pressing on despite the feeling of guilt their complaints had raised.

“Shut up, man!” the helicopter's pilot had said. “He's some fuckin' White House bigwig.”

Nothing moved on the ground below. The crewman, a Specialist 4th Class, was leaning out the open side door of the helicopter into the wind, brushing his uniform with his free hand in an attempt to decontaminate himself as much as possible. Lambert noticed that he began and ended by brushing his crotch.

Lambert looked down at his own dark green suit. He could see nothing on it, and he cared so little that he did nothing, just sat and peered down at the green Virginia countryside as it rolled by.

They followed Highway 193, which itself roughly followed the Potomac upstream. The Potomac and many other rivers and streams were emptying radioactivity into the Atlantic at an alarming rate. The Europeans were panicking, sending ships of their navies not to fight the Russians but to track the contamination in the Gulf Stream up the East Coast to forewarn of its passage across the north Atlantic to Europe. The Canadians had halted fishing in the great banks off Nova Scotia, and the Europeans were incensed that some U.S. weapons detonated in Russia caused fallout in their countries. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, outside the U.S. and Russia might perish from increased rates of cancer.

They're worried about their fish and milk products,
Lambert thought,
and the Spec 4 here is brushing fallout off his pants.
He shook his head.
Fuck them. Fuck everything.

The helicopter began to drop. The copilot turned back to Lambert and pointed down with her finger. Lambert looked out the window, and after several seconds he picked out the highway.

There were cars everywhere. They looked so normal, as if they were idling in rush-hour traffic. Many were pulled off to the side but most were right on the road. Lambert suddenly noticed that most, almost all, had dim headlights shining despite the fact that it was after five o'clock in the afternoon.
They died in the night,
he realized.

Looking at all the cars on the road below, he grew disheartened.
We'll never find her car in all that,
he thought. The helicopter was lower but sped on by the traffic jam, which Lambert saw was caused by a major accident.

Lambert had not been able to look at each of the cars as they flashed by, and he got up and walked forward to the cockpit.

“You're going too fast!” Lambert yelled to make himself heard through his mask and the hood of the copilot and over the noise of the engine.

“We're not there yet!” the woman yelled back, looking down at her map and then up ahead out through the windshield. “There!” she said, pointing ahead to the junction of a road with the highway with exaggerated jabs of her index finger.

Lambert turned his head slightly to rid the lens of his gas mask of the glare, and he saw it as plain as day. Jane's car, right where her message had said it would be.

The silver Saab was all by itself on the side of the road, the hood raised. The headlights were off. The copilot pointed and the pilot nodded as he picked out the car, and Lambert's pulse began to speed.

Oh, God,
he thought. He never really believed they would find her car. Deep down, he had thought that she would mysteriously just not be there. The thing he hadn't come to grips with was the fact that he might really find her.
Oh, my God,
he thought in sudden panic.

The helicopter was very low now, and the white dust it kicked up as it made its last bank to land facing the car was, Lambert realized, ash—fallout.

As soon as the skids touched down, the Spec 4 shouted, “Come on!” and Lambert followed him, jumping the few feet to the ground. The world around them seemed strange and alien. From the confines of the gear Lambert wore, it felt to him as if he were on another planet. As he followed the Spec 4 up to the car, the only sounds he could hear were the
thock-thock-thock
of the helicopter's rotors and the sound of his own breathing through the mask's filter. It reminded him of scuba diving—he was in a place where man was never meant to be . . . self-contained . . . alone.

“It's empty!” the Spec 4 yelled, having wiped the windows clear with his gloved hand. Greg looked in the two cleared windows. There was no sign of Jane or Irina.

“Let's go!” the enlisted man yelled as he took off back to the helicopter. Lambert turned to follow, breaking into a trot as the crewman turned to wave him on. Lambert looked all around the car to the sides of the road. There was no one.

As soon as he was aboard, the helicopter took off. The crewman sat next to Lambert panting, but Lambert forced himself up to the cockpit.

“Head on down 193 toward Leesburg a little way!” Lambert yelled.

The copilot and pilot looked at each other, and the copilot pointed at her watch, worn outside her gear. Lambert grabbed her arm and looked at the watch.

“We've got time!” he shouted. “Let's go a little farther!”

“Fifteen minutes!” the woman said, and the pilot headed on.

“Look for a black Mercedes—big car!” Lambert yelled. Jane had said that she was waiting for her parents, but she was afraid they would be too late.
She was so afraid,
he thought, and the emotions engulfed him for a moment, but he forced them down again. There would be time later.

The Spec 4 stuck his head into the space to Lambert's left.

“What the hell's goin'
on?”
he yelled.

“We're looking for a Mercedes!” the pilot said.

“Shit!”
the Spec 4 whined, slamming his hand on the bulkhead behind the pilot's back and returning, Lambert noticed, to the open door to brush his crotch some more.

The cars, now few and far between, slid by on the road below. Most were on the side of the road as if blown off by some powerful wind. It was like a scene after an ice storm, but it was summertime. Lambert tried not to think about what was inside the cars.

“There!” the copilot shouted, pointing up ahead at a car that was off the side of the road at an odd angle and pointing the wrong way. “Is that it?” she asked.

“I can't tell!” Lambert said. “Let's check it out!”

“If we land one more time,” the pilot said, “that's it! We're headed back!”

Lambert looked at the car. The color didn't look quite right; it looked brown, not black, under its coat of dust, but the model was right and there were no cars in sight up ahead.

“Okay!” he shouted. “Check it out!”

The helicopter landed in the same way as before, and Lambert and the Spec 4 began their dash. Even before Lambert made it to the car he knew that it was Jane's parents'.

Lambert swallowed as he got to the window. The Spec 4 was peering through it, having cleared a small spot and shielded his eyes against the glare. He stood up looking at Lambert and stepped back. Greg's heart raced and he felt faint. He bent to look in.

Slumped over to her right was Jane's mother. Jane's father had slid all the way off the passenger seat to the floor, his back arched awkwardly over the front edge of the seat and his head and shoulders suspended in air.

Jane's mother never drove,
Lambert thought.
Dad must have been sick.
He had to force the breaths into his lungs as he stepped over to the rear window and brushed at it with his glove, the first
swipe leaving four streaks where his fingertips had passed through the fine, powderlike ash. With the flat of his hand he wiped a large circle clear. Irina sat on the floorboard with her head on crossed arms on the seat cushion. Jane lay across the back seat, their little girl asleep on a long car trip.

The blast of hot water almost knocked Lambert over. He stood on the concrete just outside the drive-through that had once cleaned cars but now cleaned people. Through the droplets on the lens of his gas mask he watched the world rotate as he slowly turned, arms in the air, the jet of liquid digging into his body and leaving in its path a warm, itchy feeling from its force.

Into view came the washer, himself wearing protective clothing. Then the others from their flight being sprayed in front of their own stalls. Then the dikes of black wet dirt, scraped up, he assumed, by the bulldozer that sat off to the side of the decontamination facility. Then he saw the pool of water and the streams from the sprays that trickled down to add to the pool—the yellow-and-black
RADIOACTIVE
signs stuck into the earthen dam that contained the dangerous shallow pond.

Before he had completed the revolution, the spray quit pummeling him as the washer turned to the cement surface around him, pushing with small walls of water the dirt Lambert had tracked in.

The soldier yelled, “Over there!” and motioned with the nozzle of his sprayer before flexing his fingers from the unnatural strain of the sprayer's recoil. In the background their helicopter was being scrubbed with large brushes mounted on the end of poles by other protectively clad troops. The helicopter, Lambert noticed, had its own much larger dike system, and a fire truck was parked next to it, the hoses lying on the ground ready for the rinse cycle.

At the edge of the dike, a soldier wearing only a mask and gloves held a long wand in one hand with a wire running to the box held in his other. He ran the wand slowly down Lambert's front and then said, “Turn around!” Lambert watched as the rest of the helicopter crew walked toward him.

“You're clean!” the man said, and Lambert turned and awkwardly stepped over the dike. Rather than reach out to hold his arm, the man with the Geiger counter stepped back.

“You can take your mask off outside that rope and put your gear in the pile,” he said, indicating the mound of wet, dark green protective clothing that lay just inside a thin rope stretched between orange cones. “Gloves last,” the man said in parting.

Lambert walked over to the pile and took off his suit. When the mask came off and the cool, fresh air caressed his face and filled his lungs, the world suddenly seemed normal again. The sounds of the sprays and of shouts from up ahead where soldiers were unloading crates from a truck near the makeshift helipad attracted Lambert's attention in a way that they never would have before. A fresh crew in protective gear awaited decontamination and loading of their helicopter as mechanics gingerly carried the engine's air filter to the dike at the end of an oversize pair of metal tongs. A slight breeze, cool against his hair matted with sweat, brushed along the back of his neck.