There was something wrong with the base, too, although it took him a while to figure it out. Occasionally there’d be jet contrails overhead, and billowing trails to mark their progress—far more than there should have been, with no one apparently minding or nervous about any detection. More, people seemed to come and go very frequently, particularly some of the upper level people. Jeep tracks went off into the desert, and occasionally helicopters of short-range type with nondescript markings would land or take off. He couldn’t help wondering where in this waste they could be going.
At the end of the second week things got more serious but the pressure eased up. The extremely tough and demanding regimen, he realized, was to weed out the weaklings. Now the winnowing was done; those who remained were deemed qualified and fit, and classes went from being basically polemic to the practical.
Tactician One Thirty was a case in point. A black man with a heavy English-African accent, he finally got them down to specifics.
“The plan, you see, is really simple,” he told them. “We will organize you into small teams. Each of these teams will have a major city as its target. Under the new rules of overtly fascist America, you will have to move undetected to a rendezvous point, there to get both your target and your weapons. On one glorious day we will strike—simply, silently, but not without a great deal of personal danger and risk. Three days after that, the major cities of America will crumble from an enemy long since through and gone, and fully protected in any event. Our ultimatums will be everywhere; the alternative to the bulk of the American people will be revolution or death. They will chart their own revolution, of course; we shall simply be there to provide the leadership when it comes.”
“But what about the Soviets?” somebody asked. “Or the Chinese?”
The tactician smiled. “Right now both of those countries are straining to demonstrate that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks. At all times the leadership of the United States, whether in present hands or ours, will have control of the nuclear arsenal. The Chinese are not postured for a first-strike iniative on the United States in any event. The Soviets have finally managed to get two generations by without war. We feel they will welcome the revolution as an alternative to nuclear confrontation. At first they will see us as friends and allies. We will welcome them as such, and send home with them little delayed-action presents, again not attributable to us. We feel that if we can accomplish internal revolution in America, it will be that much easier in the U.S.S.R.”
Cornish saw what he meant, although he sincerely doubted the end result. No matter what the risk of nuclear confrontation, though, there was the specter of horrible plagues marching, first on the great cities of the United States, then across densely populated Europe and the Western Soviet Union. The leaders of Camp Liberty were fanatics, that was for certain. The kind of people so committed to the idea of total revolution that they would never even dare permit the hard questions to be asked.
And willing to massacre half the human race in the name of the Cause, a cause they could only vaguely define.
The man on the plane had been wrong; it was not like the old days. It was the same blind, mindless devotion to undefined revolutionary principles, yes, but where ten could only dream themselves a threat to power, this network of who-knew-how-many thousands could cause the massive death and chaos that revolutionaries of the old days only dreamed about.
And, in further lectures, they unfolded their long-range plans. Massive liquidations of the middle and upper classes; a return of the citizens of the world to a controlled subsistence economy, a world of happy peasants with none above.
Somehow, he thought, it all sounded like a return to the New Stone Age.
Ten days after he first saw Suzanne Martine on that podium she came to him. He was just lying there in his hammock, looking over a manual on a new Czech sniper rifle they were going to be issued, when she walked in.
“Hi, Sam,” she said softly.
The book fell slowly. “Hello, Suzy,” he managed.
She smiled and looked him over approvingly. “You haven’t changed all that much. A little older, a little more hair on the face and a little less on the body, but that’s about all.”
He didn’t know what to say, so he echoed her. “You haven’t changed a bit. How long have you known I was here?”
“I saw you the first lecture,” she told him. “I couldn’t believe it was you at first, so I checked and checked and kept sneaking peeks to see if it really was. Then, as soon as the indoctrination was over, I got here as quickly as I could.” She stared at him again unbelievingly. “What the hell are you doing here, Sam?” she asked.
So many emotions jumped up and down in him that he didn’t know what to say or do. There she was, standing there, and he wanted her again, even after all this time, even though he’d walked out on her before. Wanted her, and feared her, too.
Suddenly he had it. “Penance,” he said dryly.
She chuckled, then suddenly grew serious once again. “Why did you walk out, Sam? Where’d you go and what did you do? And why?” She sat down on the canvas floor of the tent, looking up at him.
Honesty, to a point, was the best policy, he decided. “I had a crisis of faith,” he said slowly. “I really believed in us, in our group, in our ultimate motives. I never once minded ripping off a bank or an insurance company or like that. We were fighting for those people who never had any money to put into a bank or buy insurance. Hell, I wouldn’t have minded if we’d knocked off Congress. But—we knocked off 386 innocent, ordinary folks and Congress and the President and Wall Street just went on and laughed at us. It was like, well, going out to assassinate the President and winding up snatching purses from little old ladies on Social Security. It blew my mind, and I had to get myself back together again. I had a —a breakdown, I guess. Like the kid who finds out there’s no Santa Claus right on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t handle it.”
He could see in her face that she was trying to understand but couldn’t, quite.
“You knew what terrorism was all about,” she said, not accusingly but questioningly. “To achieve the greatest goals for the greatest number of people, some have to perish. The innocents were martyrs to the Cause; they died so that their children and neighbors and their children could have better lives. That’s the principle of terrorism. That’s how a very small group becomes a force huge enough to topple governments.”
He nodded. “I know, I know. But, Christ! There were sixty-four kids on that plane! Children! It blew me away.”
“And yet you’re here,” she noted.
He nodded again. “Yes, I’m here. I’m here for a lot of reasons, Suzy. I’m here because I’ve spent ten years rotting in a commune in New England not thinking or accomplishing anything. I’m here, too, I guess, because there’s a goal in sight. What did we accomplish by knocking over the stuff we did? Federal fugitives, exile, death, that’s all. No rocking the corporate boat, nothing. This time we can accomplish something. This time it’s make-or-break. We’ll see the results or we’ll die. That’s something I can get a handle on, work for. I never lost my dreams, Suzy, only my feeling of doing something worthwhile.”
She seemed to accept that, although he still was certain she hadn’t understood the logic. It was a good story, a convincing story to explain his presence here—one he and a number of experts had worked long and hard on.