Arc Light (64 page)

Stuart lay on the cot in pitch darkness, drawing the heavy, stale air into his lungs without feeling refreshed by the effort. Langford coughed for the millionth time from his cot on the opposite end of the capsule as far as possible from Stuart's. The cough annoyed Stuart immensely nevertheless, and he sat up intending to yell for him to shut up. Grinding his teeth he managed to hold it in.

Langford coughed again, a wracking, tortured cough that went on for almost a full minute. With his first breath, Langford said, “Sorry,” and then coughed again.

I can't take it anymore,
Stuart thought.
Not for one more day.
Not for one more hour.
He spun his bare feet to the floor. He and Langford were stripped down to their underwear but still they sweat almost nonstop in the stifling atmosphere. He would put his uniform and protective gear on, and he would get out of this tomb.

“I'm leaving,” Stuart said into the darkness. He waited, but there was no answer. “I really mean it this time.”

“Go on, then! Go!”

Stuart angrily switched his flashlight on and in the fading, dim beam searched the confines of what had been the communications section of the capsule for his clothing. The light was weak, and he knew they were running low on batteries. He flicked the light off, and tossed it in the darkness from memory onto the cot, collapsing down beside it onto the hard but slightly cooler metal floor and running his hands through his filthy, sweat-soaked hair, grown too long and feeling unnatural.

“Hang in there, buddy,” Langford said, the last words strained as he barely completed the short sentence before coughing. “We can do this. We can make it. Just stick to the plan. We've”—he coughed again—“we've been down here three weeks. We're halfway there.”

Halfway,
Stuart thought.
Just three more weeks. Just three more weeks.
He rose and lay back down on the cot, which was wet and slightly cool.
Where were we? T—we were in the Ts. At this rate
 . . . He stopped to do the math. They should be somewhere in the P-Q-R-S range on the second run through the alphabet when they ran out of food and battery power, and therefore air.
Three weeks.

T,
he thought. “Triathlon,” he said out loud.

After a moment Langford said, “Temperature.”

“Texture,” Stuart replied.

“Tuxedo,” Stuart heard Langford say as he coughed again. Stuart's mind wandered back to the same subject as always. To the quote from somewhere long ago that had meant nothing to him at all. “Tuxedo,” Langford repeated. “Your turn.” When he didn't answer, Langford fell silent and left him alone.

The quote from some long-ago class or book rang through his head and captured his attention completely. He had never understood it before; it had meant nothing to him, and he had just stored it away. But now he understood. The quote spoke to him with the clarity of a truth discovered by experience.

Langford coughed again, a long, dry cough whose bodily purpose Stuart could not fathom.
“Hell is a very small place,”
Stuart thought again.
“Hell is a very small place.”

“Where the hell are the
SIGINT
reports for Northern Europe?” Lambert yelled through his open door, clasping his palm over the telephone's mouthpiece and hoping his secretary was there.

“They're on your desk,” she said, rushing in and waving a new batch of stapled papers in front of him before placing them with a theatrical motion on the center of his desk. He tilted his head and sighed in exasperation. “I swear I put that fax right there,” she said, continuing her defense as she walked past him to return to her desk.

“Wait, what's that?” Lambert asked, nodding at the newest additions to the pile of paper covering the blotter pad on his cold metal desk.

She turned, still peevish after his charge that she lost a fax, and picked up one of the sheaves of paper. “The Turks want to open another front into Russia from the south and are asking for immediate arms purchase credits. The Greeks have protested. You will also find an addendum from State, which opines that the Armenians are prepared to join the war on the Russian side if the Turks come their way.” She threw it down and picked up another. “Several German opposition groups have scheduled a sit-in to block road grids across Germany from Rotterdam to protest the war. Eighth Army commanders have requested permission to employ military policemen to clear the demonstrators if German federal police don't keep the roads open.” She threw the report down.

“Have you considered maybe taking a nap?” Lambert suggested, but before she could answer he heard the tinny voice through the phone say, “Mr. Lambert, would you be so kind as to either speak to me now or ring later.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Arty,” Lambert said.

“It's Arthur,” the British military liaison said from his London office as Lambert watched two junior air force officers appear at his door. Lambert motioned for them to enter. “MI5 has already determined from its own signals intelligence that. . . ”

The air force officers handed him a computer printout filled with row after row and column after column of numbers and symbols, some of them completely unrecognizable. The heading read “Spectrographic Analyses of Air Samples.”

“ . . . and if you take what the Germans and French have been saying at the U.N. as any evidence of their current intentions, we believe that you must assume the worst.”

“What worst, Arty? What are you talking about?” Lambert
cupped the receiver and whispered to the officers, “What are these, Martian love poems?”

“I'm talking about the French and Germans actively interfering with our operations by cutting off utilities to our bases, gradually restricting use of their road grids . . . ”

“We've got a second report of probable biologicals, this one from Okinawa,” the air force captain in front of him said.

When one of Lambert's aides came in and held up a thick stack of paper that could only be the President's morning briefing package—several oversize maps pressed under his free arm—Lambert looked at his watch.
Jesus,
he thought, realizing that he was supposed to give the briefing in thirty minutes. “Okay, Arthur, here's what I'll do,” he said into the phone as he motioned for his aide to put the report on his desk. “I'll have the President get Gerhardt on the line and lay it out for him one more time, but look, I thought the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State got together and allocated responsibility for relations with the whole European Community to you guys over there.”

“Well, that's quite a job now, isn't it?” Arthur said as Lambert looked at the aide taking down the last unit position maps, now eight hours old, from his wall and putting the new maps up. He squinted to see the finely drawn lines, but even across the room he could see that the Southern Prong of the European attack out of Slovakia still couldn't seem to get going. “Shit,” he cursed under his breath.

“That seems to be an extremely versatile word for you, Gregory.”

“What? Oh, never mind. It was something else. Look, I'll get to it later on.”

“And if that is too late? If the Germans begin stopping our convoys?”

“Then we blow the holy
shit
out of 'em!”

“Oh, well, of course. How silly of me.”

The air force captain dangled the air sample report from the fingers of both hands and wiggled it in front of Lambert to attract his attention. Behind him entered Lambert's secretary, who rounded his desk and began to rummage through the paper that covered it.

“I'll call you later, Arthur.”

“Sir, we've got to do something about these biological attacks,” the air force officer said as Lambert hung up and pushed by him to walk over to the newly hung maps. “General Starnes said that any response to the suspected attacks was a purely political decision, and we thought, you know, since you seemed to be on our side and all . . . ” The Northern Prong out of Poland was way ahead of schedule, but from the small circles and longer oblongs drawn in pockets
all over eastern Slovakia, the Russians' “spoiling attack,” begun hours before Operation Avenging Sword, had lived up to its name. Judging by the map, there was no Southern Prong to speak of, more like a Southern Bulge arcing the wrong way back into Slovakia.

“Aha!” his secretary declared, pulling a soiled piece of paper from his wastebasket, oily stains forming blotches all over the fax. “Absolutely covered in butter and cheese from that Danish you had for breakfast!”

“Are you ready for a run-through?” his aide asked, taking his watch off his wrist to time the presentation.

“What does it say?” Lambert asked, turning as an afterthought to make sure his secretary knew he was talking to her.

She cleared her throat. “It is from the Department of State. It says, ‘The Ukrainian Parliament voted this morning at 9:12
A.M
. Kiev time to abrogate their mutual security treaty with the Republic of Russia and to declare a unilateral cease-fire against all troops of the Western coalition effective as of 11:00
A.M
. Kiev time (0900 hours Greenwich Mean Time). Terms were as discussed—paren—a halt on allied attacks in and around Kiev, Odessa, D-ne-pro-petrovsk,” she pronounced with difficulty, “and Donetsk, retention of strategic nuclear arsenal, return of Black Sea Fleet to port, etc.—close paren. U.N. delegation is awaiting word within the hour from Minsk on Byelorussian decision, but expects similar accord and cease-fire.' ”

The President's Chief of Staff appeared, leaning against Lambert's doorframe, stuffing a bagel into his mouth and holding a paper plate under it to catch the crumbs.

“Sir, the air samples,” the air force officer behind him said.

“Has anybody gotten sick yet?”

“Not yet, sir, but they might not for some time still.”

“Come back when somebody gets sick,” Lambert said, disappointing the two junior men, who clearly thought they were onto something big, but keeping his eyes on the smiling Chief of Staff in the doorway.

“Can I have a sec, Greg?” Sol Rosen asked.

“That's about all the time I've got, Sol,” Greg said, waving at the office full of paper and people.

“I meant alone.”

Lambert looked at the others. They filed out past Rosen, who entered the office and closed the door behind him.

“What can I do for you?” Lambert asked the powerful man, Costanzo's right hand.

“Well, I'm glad you asked that. I want to ask you for a favor.”

“Okay,” Lambert shrugged, “shoot.”

“You know July first is a very important day for Paul—politically, I mean?”

“You mean the ‘photo op from hell'?” Lambert said, and Rosen laughed.

“He called it that, but he also appreciates the importance of it. Since Livingston never broke out of the grasp first of his military handlers and then of his legal counsel, this'll be the first visit to the disaster sites by a President. It's also the coming-out party for the U.S. government, emerging from the bunkers and moving into our temporary offices in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July. It's big, symbolically, and it'll be a big morale booster for the public. We've had a real problem, you've heard I'm sure, with absenteeism at the workplace. People are shying away from the big cities. They're spooked. Plus, the editorialists are having a field day with us running things out of here. Have you seen the political cartoonists' most recent efforts?”

“I don't have much time for cartoons, Sol,” Lambert said, feeling the ache from the sleepless nights and resentful that his time was being spent so trivially.

The smile left Rosen's face. “I think it would be a good thing if you accompanied the President on his tour.”

Lambert made a face. “You're kidding!” Rosen stared back blankly. “You
are
kidding, right?”

“Greg, you may not care much for the political side of things, but don't make the mistake of underestimating its importance. Look at where that got Livingston.” Rosen held up his hand as Lambert tried to interrupt. “I'm talking morale here, also, Greg. The public's morale. The latest polls”—his hand shot up again as if to ward off Lambert's objection—“and I know you like to pretend you're one of the military boys in these things, but you're not. You're on the political side of government, Greg, not the military. Regardless, the polls are significant militarily, and they already show a weakening of support for the war with all the nerve gas and biological warfare rumors and fears about the Bastion. Support's back down in the eighty percent range.”

“Jesus, Sol, eighty percent is—”

“Less than ninety percent, which is what it was when the war began.” He tossed his plate and napkin in Lambert's trash can. “Look, I'm not asking you to stump the country to sell war bonds, just that you come out of this molehill and be seen with the President. One day!”

“But why me?” Lambert asked. “There must be dozens of people running around here with one tenth the number of things on their plate.”

“Well,” Rosen sighed, “to lay it all out for you, you've got high favorables.”

“I've got what?”

“High favorables,” Rosen said. “The public's image of you—it's highly favorable.”

“Since when does the public even know who the hell I am?”

“Right!” Rosen said, smiling broadly again but then looking back at Lambert quizzically. After a moment or two of studying Lambert's expression, Rosen said, “You really are out of it, aren't you? You're big
news,
son. You have been ever since you averted what was almost a ‘bloody shoot-out for constitutional control of the country' on national television in the lobby of the Congressional Facility at Greenbriar.”