The Rift (97 page)

Jessica blinked. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

The President cleared his throat. “Now, if you don’t mind one last piece of advice ...”

“By all means, sir.”

“If you value your career, Jessica, try not to shoot up any more churches. Because then even I won’t be able to save your ass, okay?”

Jessica hesitated, trying to read the tone of the President’s voice in order to determine whether he was joking again or not. She decided she might as well reply with the truth, pedantic though it might be.

“Well, Mr. President,” she said, “it wasn’t actually a church. It was a radio station.”

The President paused for a moment, then barked out another laugh. “Oh, it was the
media
!”
he said. “In that case, I’m sure they got everything they deserved!”

The conversation ended shortly thereafter. Jessica put down the handset and walked past expectant-looking techs to her tent.

Gamsakhurdians,
she thought. The President had mentioned the menace of the Gamsakhurdians. She made a note to herself to find out who the Gamsakhurdians were, and what they were up to.

Once her present job was over, the President might need an officer who was on top of the Gamsakhurdian situation.

She passed Nelda at her desk, then entered her tent and sat behind her desk.

Pat looked at her. “What’d the man say, Jess?”

Jessica pitched her voice so that Nelda could hear.
Give her a thrill,
she thought.

“He said it was okay by him if I run for President,” she said.

*

The President returned the handset to an aide, then looked at Stan Burdett. “There we go,” he said.

“Do you think she’ll bite?” Stan asked.

“I think it’s more than possible. Give her a couple days to let it all sink in, then have Bill Marcus give her a call.”

“Bill’s the best in the business. If he can’t talk her into running, I don’t know who can.”

The President leaned back into the deep leather armchair and put his feet up on the coffee table. One thing you could say for the semirustic decor of the presidential retreat of Camp David, nobody cared if you got scuff marks on the furniture.

The President scratched his chin. A faint sadness penetrated his detachment. “Jessica’s a nice lady,” he said. “I should feel like a complete shit for doing this to her.”

But the Party needed a winner, and here was Jessica Frazetta piling up endless good-will points throughout the heart of the country. It was hard not to endear yourself to people by feeding starving families and plucking their children from floods. In the next election, three senatorial seats and a half-dozen governors’ positions would be up for grabs, all from the Mississippi Valley. Jessica had made herself a viable candidate for any one of them.

“The only question,” the President said, “is whether she decides she’s a member of the Party or not.”

“She’s always registered as an Independent,” Stan said. “A lot of those military types do.”

“Well,” the President said, “if she has the good sense to decide to come to the aid of the Party, I can help her out before she declares, pin a nice big medal on her— the Soldier’s Medal, maybe? And if she decides she’s a member of the opposition,” he sighed, “then we conclude she blew religious freedom to tiny pieces when she went into Rails Bluff, and the attorney general takes her down while our hands stay clean.”

He swung his legs down from the coffee table and rose to his feet. He looked at Stan. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said. “You want to go for a walk?”

Pine scent filled the air as the President strolled along the open paths. Wind floated through the trees with the sound of a mother hushing her child. It was pleasantly cool here in Catoctin Mountain Park, and a pleasant change from Washington, where summer heat and humidity was already smothering the city.

It was a beautiful, tranquil moment. But then
all
the President’s moments were tranquil these days. All moments were more or less like the next. It was an illustration of the Steady State theory of the President’s psyche.

The President let his eyes drift over the tree-lined crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hawks circled overhead, thermals lifting their outspread wings. “The Chinese fired three missiles,” he said. “They all landed more or less where they were intended to land. The U.S. Navy gallantly protected Taiwan by being nowhere in the vicinity. The Chinese government has announced that this round of tests is over, and it looks as if their military forces across the Straits have stood down.”

“The Seventh Fleet saves the day,” Stan said.

“But for how much longer?” the President asked. “We’re in no state to fight a war. The quakes have wrecked all that. Even if we have the capacity, the people won’t stand for it— we can’t fight any kind of conflict while millions of our own citizens are condemned to living in tents. We’re going to have to pull in our heads for ten years or more.” He looked at Stan. “You’re the expert on spin. How long can you spin that?”

Stan adjusted his spectacles. “Sooner or later, you think someone will call our bluff?”

The President watched clouds drifting beyond the Blue Ridge. He’d had an insight about clouds some days ago, he seemed to remember, but he could not bring it to mind.

“Some people have nothing left to lose,” the President said. “Others have everything to gain. There’s a worldwide recession in progress, and that will make people desperate. And there are so many flash-points now. Conflicts are almost all ethnic or religious these days, and those are the kinds of wars that are most difficult to stop once they get started. Once you start to kill your neighbors, you can’t
stop,
now, can you? Stopping just gives them the opportunity to kill
you.
And it’s worse when
God
starts telling you to kill. You can’t stop if it’s God doing the talking. The Ayatollah business is really prospering. Like that fellow in Arkansas that Jessica had to put down. How do you stop someone who
wants
the world to end? There’s no way to negotiate. There’s no common ground.”

“Sometimes, Mr. President,” Stan said, “you
can’t
negotiate. You just do what you’ve promised to do.”

The President looked at him. “Are you suggesting that a politician should keep his promises? How unlike you. I’m almost shocked.”

Stan frowned. “Only when your back’s to the wall, sir. And then when someone calls your bluff, I think that person, or his followers, should be swiftly and efficiently reduced to smoking debris. If you pick your target properly— if it’s someone you
can
reduce to smoking debris— it will make an impression on other like-minded individuals.”

A smile drifted across the President’s face. “I was just thinking how much I would welcome not having to be the head of the world’s only superpower. And now you want me to start blowing things up.”

Stan gave a tight little smile. “It should be a very controlled explosion, sir.”

“Ah. Battling on the symbolic plane, but with live ammunition. Always a delicate business.”

The President walked for a while in silence. Bluebirds flickered through the trees like bits of the sky fallen and blown about like snow.

“We shall have to try to strengthen our international institutions. NATO, the UN, the various regional alliances. I’ll have to send Darrell abroad to talk to them all. Tell them we can
lead,
but that they will have to follow with more willingness and more force than we’ve seen heretofore.” He shrugged. “Maybe it will work. I don’t have a lot of hope, since nations tend to be run either by cowards or psychopaths, and we’ve mostly got the cowards. But it seems the best we can do, and if anyone can wring commitments out of them, it will be Darrell the Happy Warrior.”

“He can be persuasive, Mr. President.”

“He has the advantage of actually believing what he is saying.” He stopped, frowned at the sight of hawks rising on the afternoon thermals. “And our
national
institutions could use some strengthening, as well. When I flew over the Mississippi Delta the other day, I saw nothing but islands. Everything that holds a people together was severed— communications, commerce, community. Boris Lipinsky tells me that large parts of the country will go for six to nine months without basic services— not even electricity. Not even telephones. And hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, will be living in refugee camps for much longer than that. You can’t expect them to be civil forever, not under that sort of pressure.

“How many will fall through the cracks?” the President wondered. “How many thousands can just
disappear
without anyone noticing they’re gone? That Arkansas pastor and his private refugee camp— that man had a
radio station
broadcasting across the whole Delta, and nobody noticed he was there. I wonder how many others are setting up in their eerie little tribal habitats without anyone seeing them? It was sort of like the Balkans, in a way. Except,” he conceded, “that the Balkans are mountains and this was a river, but it was the same, almost. Everyone cut off from everyone else. In the Balkans, they’ve been hating and fighting each other for thousands of years, as far back as history goes. And in the Mississippi Delta— well, who knows? They’re all on islands.”

He looked at Stan. “How are you going to spin your messages to them, Stan, when there’s no way to find your audience?”

Stan Burdett looked pensive. “There was a way once. People lived out there before there was electricity or radio, and they were still a part of the republic.”

“They had a ruling class. All those planters. The people did what the planters told them.” He smiled. “Like Judge Chivington’s family. They could deliver fifty thousand votes; they ran that part of Texas like they were little kings. But nobody can deliver those votes anymore, not consistently. It’s still corrupt there, but it’s nothing like it was.” He shrugged. “But now, who knows? Who knows what’s out there?”

The President gave a big smile, then laughed. “If you spin a message but there’s no one to hear it, is there a message? That’s what we should be considering.”

Stan seemed glum. “If you say so, sir.”

“I had a dream about bread yesterday. Did I mention my dream about bread?”

“No.”

“UFOs are made of bread. It’s a true fact.”

Stan just looked at him. The President clapped Stan on the shoulder. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “Let’s just walk along and enjoy the country.”

Islands, the President thought, the Balkans. He was finding equivalencies everywhere.

*

The previous day’s breeze had died away entirely, leaving a sultry, expectant stillness in its wake. Nick slept the latter part of the afternoon away beneath the pecan tree used by the Escape Committee. Aftershocks shivered the leaves over his head. The camp was quiet in the moist afternoon heat, everyone trying to stay cool, and the deputies didn’t come. Nick’s thoughts drifted like the distant clouds, remote from the world.

The longer before the deputies came, he thought as he lay beneath the tree, the more time the deputies had to make plans. Nick didn’t like to think about that.

His father, he thought, would have a quote from Sun Tzu that was appropriate to the occasion.
If you have a clue, let the enemy think you are clueless. Let the enemy believe you are wise on those occasions when you know not shit from Shinola.

Or something like that.

The westward-drifting sun shone hot on his eyelids. He shifted beneath the tree, put the shadow of a branch over his face. The leaves rustled pleasantly overhead.

What is of the greatest importance in war is to strike at the enemy strategy.
Sun Tzu’s words, in the accents of General Jon Ruford, floated into his mind. So, he thought, what was the enemy strategy?

Obviously, to keep the refugees in the camp, and to keep the world from finding out what they were doing.

Escaping from the camp would strike at the first object of the strategy. But what would strike at the second?

Making phone calls to the media and the authorities, he supposed. But both were far away, and the locals phones supposedly didn’t work, and even if the state police or the Army heard of the horrors in Spottswood Parish they might not be able to respond quickly.

There were a couple dozen deputies involved with what was happening in the camp, and some of them, like the sheriff, hadn’t been seen in days. This suggested that the other inhabitants of Spottswood Parish— and there had to be thousands— either knew nothing of what was happening here, or were taking good care not to know. The Klan sheriff, or someone, was managing events so that it was difficult to find out what was happening here.

Nick wished he could grind the whole sordid scene right into the faces of the world.

Then he sat up suddenly. The sun shining through tree limbs blinded him for an instant, and in the flash of unexpected light he knew how to proceed.

“We go to Shelburne City,” he said aloud. Two members of the Escape Committee looked at him.

“I take the Warriors to Shelburne City,” Nick said. “Just like Sun Tzu.”

Nick remembered the details only vaguely. Back in ancient China, Kingdom A had been on the verge of defeating Kingdom B. Sun Tzu, who commanded the army of Kingdom C, was ordered to go to the aid of the beleaguered Kingdom B. But instead of reinforcing Kingdom B, he took his whole army and marched straight for the capital of Kingdom A, which forced the enemy to retreat from Kingdom B to defend their own country. Sun Tzu caught the army on the march and destroyed it, winning the war.

Nick had planned for the Warriors to stay in the area of the camp as a rear guard while the rest of the refugees evacuated to a more defensible area. But that was surrendering initiative to the enemy. It would allow them all the time they needed to gather their forces and respond.

What Nick needed to do was to force the issue by attacking Kingdom A. He needed to take the Warriors right into Shelburne City and seize a big, defensible building in as public a place as possible. The people in the parish couldn’t ignore
that.
They would have to start asking questions. The enemy would have to respond to that first, they couldn’t go haring off into the countryside looking for escaped refugees. They would have to meet Nick on their own ground.