Line of Succession (15 page)

Instead he engaged the two chopper pilots in small talk. They were Navy officers—easy to converse with; they had been chosen for their mannerliness and appearance as well as their aeronautical skill. McNeely himself had started building model airplanes at the age of nine and the fascination had never left him.

“… forty-five-foot rotor. Horsepower? Close to a thou, she'll cruise at one-thirty. We'll make Madrid easy this afternoon, hundred and thirty-five minutes, forty-five minutes' fuel to spare.”

“Usually they use the Thirteen-Jay for this kind of thing, don't they?”

“Usually. But that's a smaller machine, it hasn't got the ceiling of this bird.” Anderson spoke with proprietary pride.

The chopper was a Bell Iroquois, HU-1J, with VIP accommodations for six passengers in comfort; she had the Navy's blue paint job and stenciled Sixth Fleet markings. McNeely ignored the nibblings of his conscience while he killed nearly an hour chatting with Anderson and Cord about choppers and missions.

The two pilots were ten-year veterans whose seams and creases were not in their faces but in their worn leather flight jackets. They said “hep” for help and “thank” for think and they talked in a technological jargon that annihilated human communication; they had the kind of minds which McNeely despised in the collective sense—the Silent Sophomority, Muddle Americans—but they were good likable men and McNeely was not a man to let philosophical principle get in the way of human pleasures.

Guilt finally goaded him toward the papers in his room. He left the pilots on the deck drinking coffee out of thermoses.

He made the final cuts and changes in the speech Fairlie would deliver this afternoon and then he showered and changed into a gray Dunhill suit and walked along the mezzanine to Fairlie's room.

Fairlie was on the phone with Jeanette; he waved McNeely to a chair.

When Fairlie rang off McNeely said, “My God that's disgusting.”

“What is?”

“All that billing and cooing at your age.”

Fairlie just grinned. He was in the chair beside the phone in a Madras dressing gown; now, when he began to get out of his seat, he seemed to go on rising for an incredible length of time—a tall multijointed man unfolding himself hinge by hinge.

They talked while Fairlie dressed: about Perez-Blasco, about Brewster, about the Capitol bombing, about the U. S. Air Force bases at Torrejon and Saragossa and the Navy base at Rota.

Perez-Blasco was the Messiah, the Judas; the beloved savior of the people, the despot they were learning to despise; the liberal genius, the stupid tyrant; the incorruptible protector, the racketeering gangster; the Goddamned Commie, the Goddamned fascist. He might raise the nation's standard of living; he might spend everything on palaces and yachts and a numbered Swiss account. “You just don't know, do you. You just can't tell. I wish he'd been in office longer.”

“He could say the same about you.”

Fairlie laughed.

McNeely waited for him to knot his tie and then handed him the speech. “Nothing out of the ordinary. One of the standard variations on harmony and friendship.”

“It'll do.” Fairlie was looking it over carefully, committing blocks of it to memory so he wouldn't have to speak with downcast eyes glued to the page. He liked to eyeball his audiences. In this case it hardly mattered; the speech was short and it was in English and at least half the people in the room wouldn't understand one word in ten.

“Sometimes,” McNeely said, “I wonder if we really need these damned bases at all. They're like sores on the earth, they keep festering.”

“We're all developing a conscience, aren't we? This revulsion toward the idea of global power. We'd all like to return to simple times and unload these responsibilities.”

“Maybe they're responsibilities only because we think they're responsibilities.”

Fairlie shook his head. “I've been tempted that way but it doesn't hold water. It's an emotional isolationism—anti-militarism. We like to vilify our own military power but you know it's created a balance of sorts—not very satisfactory, I guess, but at least it's given us conditions where we've got some chance of success negotiating with the Chinese and the Russians. We're a stabilizing factor, we make our presence felt and I imagine it eases the crises a lot more often than it aggravates them.”

McNeely replied with enough of a grunt to let Fairlie know he was listening, without interrupting Fairlie's train of thought.

“It's not the power that festers, I think. It's the inconsistency of its use. You can't be effective in foreign affairs without some philosophical direction—otherwise your actions are unpredictable and the other side is going to miscalculate all the time.”

A knock: it was Rifkind at the door.

“Something wrong, Meyer?”

“A little trouble, sir. It looks like the helicopter broke down.”

McNeely sat up. “What's wrong with it?”

“Cord explained it to me, sir, but I couldn't make much sense out of it.”

McNeely poked an arm into his coat and strode out onto the deck. Cord and Anderson were on top of the fuselage poking into the engine. They had grease all over them.

“What's wrong?” McNeely was sharp; time was getting tight.

“Beats shit out of me,” Anderson mumbled. Then he looked over his shoulder and recognized McNeely. “We started to warm her up, we were going to top up the tanks, and all of a sudden she starts letting go like a banshee. Man what a racket. Didn't you hear it?”

Fairlie's room was at the back; McNeely hadn't heard anything. He said, “What does it look like?”

“I ain't sure. Oil pressure checks out, but she's sounding like she got no oil in there. Everything scraping. Like sand in the works, you know?”

“You don't see anything?”

“No sir.”

“How soon can we get another machine up here?”

The Sixth Fleet was off Barcelona—that was a little more than a hundred miles away. Anderson said, “About an hour, I expect.”

“Get one.”

He went back to the suite and reported to Fairlie. Rifkind trailed along and said, “Of course there's a possibility of sabotage, but right now we don't even know what's wrong with the machine.”

“See what you can find out.”

“Sir.” Rifkind went.

Cord arrived to say they had radioed a request to the Fleet and a replacement chopper was on its way. Fairlie checked the time and said to Rifkind, “You'd better call Madrid.”

“Yes sir. If they chug right along we oughtn't to be more than a half hour late.”

Rifkind and Cord left; McNeely said, “It'll be good for a laugh in Madrid. Another case of marvelous American technology.”

“Breakdowns happen. It doesn't matter.” Fairlie slid the speech into his inside pocket.

The view through the window was spectacular: vast broken planes, an upheaval aglitter with snow, a craggy wilderness; Fairlie, McNeely thought, had a face that matched it.

Fairlie spoke abruptly. “Liam, you remember what Andy Bee said about a President running for a second term?”

“That it ties his hands? Yes, I remember. Why?” Andrew Bee, one-time Senator and now a Congressman from Los Angeles County, had been Fairlie's strongest opponent in the Republican presidential primaries and had only deferred to Fairlie at the last minute at Denver. A big lumberjack, Andrew Bee; and a thoughtful force in American politics.

Fairlie said, “I'm not going to run for a second term, Liam.”

“What, tired of the job already?”

“Bee was right. It's got to hamstring a man. You can't be expected to be both President and politician.”

“The hell. That's the object of the game.”

“No. I'm going to announce it right up front. I want you to put it in the draft of the Inaugural Address.”

“With all due respect I think you're nuts. Why commit yourself?”

“It frees my hand.”

“To do what?”

Fairlie smiled a little with that unexpected self-deprecation that sometimes, out of context, warmed his face. As if reminding himself not to equate his person, with the power of the office he was about to assume. “Andy Bee and I had some long talks. The man has some important ideas.”

“I'm sure he does. Next time he runs for President maybe he'll get a chance to put them into practice.”

“Why wait?”

“To do what?” McNeely asked again.

“Mainly to rip apart the committees.”

“That's a pipe dream.” McNeely knew all about that, it had been Andrew Bee's private crusade for years: the unraveling of the archaic committee system in Congress which governed not by majority but by seniority. The satrapies of Congress were tyrannies of old men, most of them rural, many of them corrupt, some of them stupid. No law could pass without the support of these old men, yet nothing in the Constitution required this shackling of Congress; for years the younger members, led by Andrew Bee, had called for reform.

“It's not a pipe dream, Liam.”

“If you want to get legislation through, you've got to have committee support. If you attack the chairmen they'll eviscerate you.”

“But if I'm not running for reelection what have I got left to lose?”

“All the rest of your programs.”

“Not if I settle this one first,” Fairlie said. “And don't forget those old boys have to be reelected too. I think they understand the sentiments of the times. Look at the kind of support Andy Bee has with the public. He's made his stand on the issue for years and the public's solidly behind him.”

“You're the one they elected President. Not Andrew Bee.”

Fairlie only smiled; he turned and reached for his coat. “Let's go outside, I want some air.”

“Don't you realize how cold it is out there?”

“Oh come on, Liam.”

McNeely went to the phone and summoned assistants to organize Fairlie's belongings and bring them along to the deck. When he put down the phone Fairlie was almost to the door. McNeely said, “You really want me to put that in the Inaugural Address?”

“Yes.”

“Well what the hell. It won't do any harm. You can always change your mind later.”

Fairlie laughed and went out. McNeely caught up on the mezzanine and joined the circle of Secret Service men moving along with him.

Cord was canted over the open engine compartment of “the chopper; Anderson, on the deck, was rubbing his hands and exhaling steam. McNeely looked at his watch, buttoned his coat, turned the collar up around his ears. Fairlie was looking up the ski slope, squinting, smiling with visible wistfulness.

McNeely walked over to Anderson. “Find anything yet?”

“I sure can't figure it. Everything checks out good. But she's still screechin' ever time we start her up.”

“Sounds like gasoline trouble. Did you check the fuel pump?”

“First thing.” Anderson made a gesture of baffled disgust with his hands. “Anyhow they're flying a mechanic up passenger on the bird they sending in to replace this one. He'll figure it out.”

McNeely nodded. A helicopter was not such a fragile mechanism as it appeared. True, it lacked the dubious visible stability of wings and for that reason a great many people distrusted it but the truth was a helicopter had a better glide chance than a jet plane: if a jet engine quit in midair the plane would hit the ground like a bomb; if a helicopter lost its engine in midair the rotors would freewheel and you could let yourself down dead-stick, and a chopper in distress required very little flat surface area to land on. McNeely respected the fluttery machines.

He patted the metal skin of the big chopper and turned away. Anderson was striding around the far corner of the hotel, possibly headed for one of the rear workshops to hunt up additional tools.

When the pilot went out of sight, McNeely drifted over to Fair-lie's little circle, his mind going back to Fairlie's quietly explosive statement about not running for reelection. It was the kind of statement which, if made in heat, meant nothing; but made in deliberate calm, on the basis of obvious lengthy consideration, it meant everything. McNeely stood with the statement undigested, like a lump in his chest that wouldn't go up and wouldn't go down. Politics at the very top was the most fascinating game in the world and McNeely, a championship player, selfishly wanted it to go on: but Fairlie was dead right and intellectually McNeely could only accept that it was time to quit playing games.

A stray cool vesper brought the distant flut-flut-flut to his ears and he turned, searching the sky. Presently it appeared between the mountains, a dragonfly of a helicopter with its skinny tail in the air: a Bell Sioux 13R, the DC-3 of helicopters, the military workhorse since Korea.

McNeely hurried back to Cord, the copilot on the engine housing.

“Did you guys call for a Thirteen?” McNeely shouted to make himself heard.

Cord looked up. His head swiveled, he focused on the incoming chopper, he shook his head and cupped his hands around his mouth to shout down. “We only got two big ones aboard. Maybe the other one was out airborne someplace.”

It could cause a problem. The Sioux was a reliable machine but it carried only three passengers. Two passengers if you insisted on having two pilots.

He threaded the cluster of Secret Service men and buttonholed Rifkind and moved him over next to Fairlie. “That's a three-passenger chopper,” McNeely said.

The Navy helicopter descended slowly, expertly in the thin high-altitude air; it settled on its skids at the far end of the deck beyond the grounded Huey.

The group walked forward; Fairlie was saying, “It's all right, what the devil, I'll go along with Meyer and Liam. The rest of you can go down to Madrid by car.”

Rifkind said, “No sir. You need more coverage than just me.”

“Now come on, Meyer, there'll be an army of Spanish police to mother-hen me the minute we land.”