The corporal, breathing air in big gulps, turned to Wallis. “What’ll I do, sir?” he begged.
Hooper snapped, “Cut out the snivelling, boy. You heard. The President has been relieved of his command. You take your orders from . . .”
“Ignore that,” Wallis cut in. “Your supreme commander is the President. This is an attempted coup devoid of legal authority.”
“You treacherous bastard,” Bellarmine snarled.
The corporal, eyes rolling in his head, moaned, “Oh Holy Mother of God!”
“We’re losing Xochicalco!” Fanciulli shouted. “There’s a whole lot of static.”
A red light flashed over the oak door.
“Stay where you are,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. He strode to the door and flung it open. He recoiled in horror as the inert body of a Secret Service man fell back against his legs, a round, ruddy face staring upwards, prim round mouth half open, with a white shirt stained by a row of red patches. A young marine, breathing heavily, blood trickling
down the side of his head, stepped over the body into the room and saluted the President.
“What’s going on here?” the President asked.
Hallam followed the marine in. His cheek was grazed and swollen. “We’re more or less on top of it, Sam. Somebody’s monkeyed with the switchboards but we’re working on it.”
“Oh Christ,” said Hooper. Bellarmine looked as if he was about to faint. He sank into his chair, burying his face in his hands.
“Sir!” Wallis shouted, leaning over a screen. “The Back-fires are twelve minutes from Canadian airspace. Eighteen still on a Kansas azimuth, two have broken away for Alaska, the Purdhoe Bay area.”
“Sir!” a soldier shouted, “We may have an intruder in Californian airspace, flying low north of Pendleton. Nothing on radar.”
“The sneaky bastards. While we watch the Kola build-up they send Stealths on ahead from the Urals,” said Hooper. “We’re out of time as of now.”
“The
Carl Vincent
,” the President shouted, “on the blower, NOW.”
“Sir,” the corporal whooped, “I’ve been trying to tell you. We lost her twenty seconds ago. All I’m getting is static.” The speaker on the table crackled into life. There was a voice, hidden under layers of static, distorted beyond the possibility of decipherment.
“Does anyone understand this?” Grant shouted.
“It’s the asteroid,” Bellarmine said in exasperation. “It’s hit. Don’t you see we have to hit back?”
“Sir!” a soldier shouted, “NORAD say another eighty Backfires have taken off from Kola.” He pointed to a television screen.
There was a tiny strip of runway, and a desolate snowy landscape, and a clutter of buildings. Little black moths were gliding along the runway or strung out in black moving silhouettes against the snow. Grant said, “Oh please God, not that.”
Hooper said, “What does it take, Sam? The blast is on the way in now!”
The black girl waved and pointed. “Mister President, we have the picture from Goddard. On the screen.”
“Sergeant, Hooper and Bellarmine are under arrest. Anyone who reaches for the red phone is to be shot. No warnings, just shoot.”
“Yes
sir
.” The picture was a shimmering, irresolute haze.
“What the futz is this?” Grant snapped. “Has it hit or not?”
“They’re doing a maximum entropy, sir.”
“A what?”
“They’re trying to sharpen it up.”
“Wallis, what gives with Xochicalco?”
“The channels are full of static, sir. We’re getting nothing.”
“Mister President,” said Hooper, “whatever the legalities of our action, we’ll be scattered to the winds any time now. Whatever your reasons for inaction, you can’t hold off any longer. America is under attack now. Get our missiles away now. We only have seconds.”
“Mister President, I beg you on my knees, launch!” Bellarmine implored.
“So it’s hit?”
“Sir,” said a man in naval uniform, “it could just have grazed the upper atmosphere. That would give us EMP but no impact.”
“Where’s the frigging Kremlin?”
Wallis said, “Sir, every damn channel to the Kremlin seems to be out. We’re going to try a straight commercial phone line.”
“Why isn’t Goddard delivering?”
“Sir, they say the picture needs to be processed.”
“How long, woman?” the President shouted at the top of his voice.
She shrank visibly and spoke quickly into the phone. “Five minutes, sir.”
“Five
what
?” Grant yelled, and the girl crumpled, tears welling up.
Wallis said, “Sir, if you want an effective response you’re down to maybe a minute, maybe less.”
“Get them away, Grant!” Hooper bellowed, his fist raised. He half-rose from his chair, as if he was about to lunge for the telephone. The marine, a look of pure terror on his face, raised his rifle towards the General. Hooper lurched back and smashed his fist repeatedly on the table.
The President raised his arms like an old-fashioned preacher. The room fell silent. Someone next door began to recite an ancient prayer, in a calm Southern accent:
Our Father which art in Heaven
. . .
He picks his way over the cables and stares at the video camera following him. It stares back indifferently. He stands at the flag, hanging by the door. The black girl next to him is sobbing quietly. He puts his hand on her shoulder. The flag begins to blur and to his surprise Grant realizes that he too is weeping.
He looks around, unashamed, the tears trickling down his chin. He is no longer in a command post deep under the ground: he is in a wax museum. And somehow the museum is also a sea, an ocean of faces stretching around the globe, faces born and unborn, all awaiting the decision of this one man, this country boy from Wyoming. Insects crawl under his skin. They have tearing forceps for jaws. A crab in his stomach is tearing its way out, devouring his intestines as it does. Acid trickles down his throat, burning his gullet. The dull pain in his chest has long since grown to a tight grip.
Of course it’s obvious. Has been all along.
A voice whispers, “Mister President, we have maybe thirty to sixty seconds before the blast hits us.”
“Hell of a decision for a Wyoming ploughboy, Nathan.”
The voice whispers again, “Sir, we need your word.”
“I don’t know how we got into this state—maybe it’s beyond human control. Maybe the world goes in cycles and it’s my luck to be in the hot seat when the time comes to
crash out. You didn’t need your rebellion, Mister, I was getting around to my planet of ashes. So goodbye, my children, and hail to the mutants.”
Deliver us from the Evil One
. . .
“Wallis, get on with it. Hooper, proceed with Grand Slam. Mitchell, fire your Tridents.” The soldiers quickly move to terminal screens and begin to speak into telephones. Grant reaches out for the red phone. Wallis breaks open a sealed envelope.
For Thine is the Kingdom . . .
Someone, a woman, says nervously, “Mister President, it’s the British Prime Minister.” Her voice is lost in the immensity.
The Power and the Glory . . .
“Can’t someone stop this?” another woman asks. “I have children.”
Forever. Amen
.
Wallis sits down at a desk, near the back of the protected room. A camera swivels round to follow him. He starts to read numbers into a telephone, one at a time, in a clear, decisive voice. The President picks up a red phone, and the camera quickly swings back towards him. But Grant’s vision is blurred, and his hand is shaking. He tries to talk but words won’t come. Bellarmine’s eyes are staring, willing the President on. Hallam stands in the midst of it, hand over his eyes like a child keeping out some fearful monster. Hooper’s jaw is clenched to the point where he can hardly speak.
An ancient telex machine, a comedy thing, a museum piece amongst the Silicon Valley technology, bursts into life, chattering. “Oh sweet Jesus oh sweet Jesus. Sir, it’s President Zhirinovsky.”
Simultaneously, the British Prime Minister’s voice comes over the speaker, as clearly as if he is calling from the next room. “Ah, good morning, Mister President. Have I called at a bad moment?”
The meteor comes in high over the Sonora desert, trailing a long, luminous wake and throwing moving shadows on the ground far below. Near the end of its flight it flares up, splits in two and then it is gone from the star-laden sky.
“Did you see that?” Judy asked, appearing from around the porch of the house.
“A sporadic, I think,” said Webb. “There are no showers at this time of year.” In the starlight, Webb could just make out that she was wearing the same crocheted shawl he had seen her in at Oaxtepec, and the same crocheted bikini; and she had the same elegant bodywork. She was carefully carrying two tumblers filled to the brim with a liquid which seemed to glow orange-red. She handed him a drink and sat cross-legged on a rug laid out next to the tub. To Webb she looked like a satisfied Buddha.
He shifted his leg. The hospital nurse had finally removed the swathes of bandage. Judy had left her Pontiac Firebird for him with a map and he had gurgled the big psychedelic car along the I-10 through Tucson and then along Gates Pass before turning north into a narrow road cutting through the Saguaro National Park. The six-inch gash in his thigh still ached from the journey, but the warm water of the big whirlpool tub was beginning to ease the pain. Big Saguaro cacti stood around them in dark outline, like silent sentinels, or triffids.
She sipped at the drink. “How’s the leg?”
“Better, Judy. Thanks for the invitation, by the way. I’m impressed.” He waved his hand to encompass the Sonoran desert, the cacti, the dark, snow-tipped mountains and the huge celestial dome which dwarfed it all. Out here in the desert, the stars were a lot brighter. Here and there the lights of houses were scattered, like candles in a dark cathedral.
“Well, you were told to rest. This is a good place to do it. I call it Oljato, which is Navajo for the Place of Moonlight Water.”
“Although the company is boring.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Be careful, Oliver. There are rattlesnakes out there.”
Webb sipped at the drink. It was chilled, and had a distinctive flavour which he associated with Mexico but couldn’t otherwise place. “So what does your Fort Meade mole say?”
“The investigation’s still under way. It seems the operation was planned by a small group of clever people in the NSA. It was a sort of Cyberwars in reverse.”
“Cyberwars?”
“Information warfare. Look at the damage single hackers have done when they penetrated a system’s computers. Now think of a planned attack by hundreds of them, based in some hostile country, penetrating thousands of computers. They could build up undetectable back doors over a long period of time and then strike all at once. They could crash planes, erase files from businesses and laboratories, penetrate rail networks, cause financial chaos, destroy the command and control of weapons systems, all from the safety of their own country and using nothing more than computer terminals.”
“But surely that’s a recognized problem,” said Webb.
Judy nodded. “But what people had in mind was an external enemy. Nobody thought there might be an enemy within.”
“And because they protect the systems, they know about
them,” Webb suggested. “And they know all there is to know about information warfare.”
“Which knowledge was used by a small group within the National Security Agency against the American leadership. The Chiefs of Staff, the President, the Secretary of Defense, they fooled everybody.”
“The old problem,” Webb said. “Who protects us from our protectors?”
“These people weren’t traitors, Ollie. They were patriots. They had a clear-headed view that the country had to protect itself against a perceived future attack by taking pre-emptive action. That action could not be taken by an administration proclaiming peaceful co-existence.”
“And the CIA was in on it too?”
“Again, my mole thinks only a small clique within the organization. They only needed a few guys. The upper echelons were taken in just like everybody else.”
Webb leaned back and sank up to his neck in the warm water. “I like the way they’re trying to handle the aftermath. Actually selling the conspirators’ story to the public. A straightforward near-miss asteroid, the Naval Observatory observations a mistake etcetera. They’ll never get away with that.”
“Don’t be so sure, Ollie. Nemesis has supposedly rushed back into the blind zone, deflected by Earth’s gravity.”
“Forget it.”
Judy drew the shawl closer around her shoulders. “The
Enquirer
said it was a CIA plot to make the President zap the Russians, did you see?”
Webb grinned. “And not a soul believes them. What’s the line on the palace revolution?”
“In the Kremlin? The analysts don’t know. My guess is the Russian Army decided Zhirinovsky was just too dangerous to have around.”
“It was close. I’m glad the driver’s ignition worked.”
“But now they’ve pulled out of Slovakia, and they’re
getting back to some semblance of democracy. We’ll see what the elections bring.”
Webb’s eyes were now fully dark-adapted. A little lemon tree, almost next to the whirlpool tub, glowed gently. At this latitude his old winter friend Orion the Hunter was high in the sky; Sirius, a white-hot A star, lit up the desert from nine light years away; the Milky Way soared overhead, bisecting the sky. And Mars beckoned from the zodiac, unwinking and red. A strange feeling came over him, the same one he had experienced in a little church in a cobbled lane in Rome a million years ago. It was unsettling, a one-ness with something; he didn’t understand it. The desert at night, Webb felt, was a spiritual experience.
“The world’s getting dangerous, Judy. Some day we’ll build a Noah’s Ark and move out. A little seedling, the first of many, to scatter our civilization and our genes around the stars. Once we’re spread around a bit nothing can extinguish us.”
She was smiling. “I guess I overdid the tequila. But I can’t make up my mind about you, Oliver. Are you a visionary or a screwball?”
“I’m just a quiet academic who wants to get on with his research.”