“Teen Angel,” and “It’s All in the Game.” Jackie melted into Justin’s arms. The sound of blaring whistles and wailing sirens shattered her reverie.
“It’s a raid!” someone yelled.
Everyone who had been on the dance floor or at a table began to run. People screamed and raced in every direction. Jackie, terrified and immobile, panicked at the thought of being separated from Justin by the bodies plunging all around her. But Justin deftly reached through the churning crowd and grabbed her hand. He squeezed it and said, “Keep cool. I’ll try to get u.s out of here. If they catch us, don’t tell them your real name.”
He pulled her back to their table. Puncher was standing on a chair, looking for an escape route. One of the kids from Omaha ran up to them. “Follow me,” he shouted above the whistles and yelling.
There was an instant of indecision. The kids from Milford all looked toward Justin. He nodded once, and they all followed the boy from Omaha. He led them behind the bandstand to a trapdoor, then squeezed through it and ran along a dark, narrow passageway. Screams and whistles followed Jackie as she held tight to Justin’s hand and sprinted through the darkness toward an open door. They all poured out into an alley.
“Oh God, we made it,” one of the girls said, and broke into tears.
“Okay, we’ve got to split up and find our cars,” Justin said. “Keep in the shadows.”
Suddenly a powerful searchlight pierced the dark alley, encircling and trapping them all. Jackie was blinded. She heard dogs barking, then a wailing siren and men yelling, “Nobody move!”
“Cops!” Puncher roared. “Run!”
For an instant Jackie froze, her pulse pounding in her temples. Justin seized her arm above the elbow. “Come on,” he hissed. They raced down the alley with police and dogs in pursuit.
High atop one of the buildings a block from the alley, a group of men were watching.
The door to Andrei’s suite was left ajar. A young man escorted Peter in, then left quickly. It was a comfortable suite, not grand. Peter’s eyes moved to the terrace where a figure stood, silhouetted against a dark, wintry evening. The sound of police sirens cut into the night. Peter walked to Andrei, disturbing his reverie. The Russian turned toward the source of the interruption.
“I’d like to show you something,” said Andrei. Peter approached him. In the distance he could see the fracas between the police and kids. The helicopters, searchlights, and popping sounds of tear gas exploding seemed unreal.
“What’s going on?” he asked, without taking his eyes away from the disruptive scene.
“On our reports we call them ‘disturbances.’ It is young people attacking symbols of power. Those they can see—your president, senators, public buildings, the police, of course. It makes them feel they are accomplishing something. What’s your opinion of such disturbances?”
“Pretty stupid. Sad, actually.”
Andrei watched him carefully, waiting to see if Peter might retract his candid opinion. “It is controlled provocation. Agents stir up the young people so we can let them feel rebellious at the same time that we can keep track of them—scare them, arrest some, perhaps even move them to other parts of the area.”
Peter continued to watch the disturbance, his jaw set tight. He was not in favor of such manipulative tactics; he found them repugnant.
“I can see you do not approve. What would you do?”
“I guess I’d try to find a way to use the energy a little more productively.”
“For whom? You or us?”
“Maybe both.”
Andrei raised his eyebrows. “Do you think that is possible?”
“It better be.”
Graciously, with an old-world ease Americans still found surprising, Andrei motioned Peter back into the warmth of the sitting room. When he spoke again, his tone was thoughtful, speculative. “You know, Bradford, no one in the Kremlin believed America would go down without a fight. They thought it would take a bloodbath—or a nuclear attack.”
“I guess it surprised us, too. The country was filled with millions of guns. And we supposedly had a tradition of not letting anyone tell us what to do.”
“Maybe it had become just that—a tradition. Perhaps you had just gotten too soft, too selfish, too afraid of losing what you had to protect it.”
“We had no plan. At first it was our own troops just keeping order. Then the UNSSU Peacekeeping teams. By the time anyone realized what was going on, the Special Service Units were completely in place and they seemed invulnerable. Not to mention the communication problem. Nobody had any idea what was going on anywhere else.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret Soviet strategy. We believed that the Electro Magnetic Pulse would disrupt your military communications enough for us to succeed. And your banking system. What we didn’t expect was that without communications the United States would revert to a collection of separate peoples— separate regions. We’ve just restricted communications from area to area—with the intent to diminish the sense of national unity, of common purpose, so to speak. And it worked. People in one area don’t care about anything but what happens to them.”
“You just got the drop on us,” Peter said somewhat defensively.
“You don’t believe that. We both know the Soviet plan worked because you lost your country before we ever got here.”
Peter stared incredulously at Andrei. “You sound disappointed that you succeeded.”
Andrei did not respond. Suddenly he felt as if he had been a little too open with Mr. Bradford. “Why is it you wish to help us?”
Peter appeared shocked. “I don’t wish to help you. I wish to help my country.”
“There is no country.”
“My people then. My family—my community.”
“Why do you think we should accept that your purposes and ours are compatible?”
“I’m not saying that you should accept it. You asked for this meeting.”
There was a burst of fire in the street. They both watched the people below scattering like apples from an overturned cart.
“I’m enough of a realist,” Peter continued, “to know you’re not going to let America become a threat to you.” He looked at Andrei. “But maybe there’s a way for us to pull together more as an area. Hell, give us an incentive. Give us the incentive of getting rid of the occupation and maybe we’ll prove that we can function and not be a threat.”
Andrei turned from the disturbance and looked at Peter, somewhat solemn. “It’s a tragedy, isn’t it? A great country, a great idea. You have no idea how many people looked to the American experiment as the answer—the hope. Now we’ll never know.”
“What?”
“Whether it would have destroyed itself anyway.”
As Justin, Jackie, and their Milford friends moved warily toward their cars, Justin looked down the street back toward the club and saw the Cavern disc jockey casually chatting with a police officer.
“It was a setup,” he declared, climbing into the station wagon. “Can you believe this bullshit?”
He whipped the car down a deserted alley, taking evasive action even though it seemed they were not being followed. But within seconds, the headlights of another vehicle cut into the empty street behind them.
“Jus, there’s a police car back there,” Puncher said, his voice sticking in his throat.
Justin skidded around the next comer at fifty, and the other car followed close behind. They drove without lights toward the outskirts of the city, the police cruiser always following too close for comfort. After several miles the cars headed down a country road along the river. Justin drove carefully and slowly for a bit, stringing their pursuers along. Then, swiftly, with screaming tires and groaning axles, he cot the car sharply down an overgrown dirt path. After a few moments of inky darkness on all sides, they knew they’d gotten away. Justin drove a bit farther, then stopped the car and, for the first time since fleeing the Cavern, looked over to Jackie. She sat shaking quietly beside Mm. He moved closer and put his arms around her, holding her tenderly. She reached up and kissed him hungrily, almost desperately, the unaccustomed wine spicing her breath. With nervous laughs born of a close call, the others in the backseat egged Justin on until he turned back angrily and demanded quiet.