Wham-boom.
The biggest boom since the IED in Iraq, when he’d gone there for Bush twenty years ago. This one knocked all three of them flat on their asses. Lying on his back, he was perfectly positioned to see the sky fill instantly with a great cloud of dirty blue smoke, which tumbled to the east almost before it fully formed. From the cloud fell a rain of plastic bottles, a few into his plant, most over the fence, and quite a lot of them, caught in the strong mountain breeze, tumbling and blowing off far to the east. Some of them were going to be in fucking South Dakota before they came down, he thought, and then he realized that one whole day of recycling had just blown off into the sky, with all the trucks and workers already paid for, and he screamed and beat the ground with his fists like a two-year-old having a tantrum, until he realized that Fred and Annie, with their bleeding ears, couldn’t hear it, his hands were getting sore, and his ears hurt horribly. He couldn’t hear anything, though bits of plastic bottles were crashing down all around him and on the steel roofs of his buildings, and it should have been a terrible din.
Howard was stroking Michiko’s breasts and hair, real soft and gentle the way she said she liked. She was handling Isaac, who was breathing like he was about to finish.
Something went off like a cannon. Isaac, sitting up, bumped heads with Michiko; they were both still apologizing when Lenya, the Russian lady that owned the place, knocked on the door and said, “Howard, Isaac, so so sorry, something happen to your truck, dress and come out, okay?”
A few minutes later, hastily stuffed into their clothes, barefoot on the sunny parking lot, they stood stupefied in awe by the burned and scarred truck bed and the shattered windows. One other car, nearby, had taken a big crack in the rear window, but Reverend Nickleson had already driven it off to the auto-glass place, saying he didn’t want to involve his insurance company.
The cop who came out, unfortunately, was Matt Storey, who had enough trouble figuring out how to fill out speeding tickets, so no matter how much they tried to tell him about the two mystery bottles they’d been carrying in the back, he just kept shaking his head and saying it was probably kids. It was dark before he left to write his report, which would say something blew up in the pickup truck bed and it was probably kids.
After they swept the glass off the seat, Howard tried starting the truck. It was drivable, though it stank like a firecracker, and most of the gauges weren’t working.
“Probably leaking everything everywhere, too,” Isaac said, shining his flashlight under it. “Got oil and radiator, at least, dripping, and a couple things I ain’t sure of. But if we top up the oil and drive it home slow and careful, we can probably get it there. Think we got gas leaking?”
Howard sniffed. “I don’t smell any—just the sulfur from those bombs.”
Lenya told them no charge, rain check, and she’d take care of paying Michiko. “Reminds me when I’m still one of the girls, back in Brooklyn,” she said. “I had me a real good customer, one day he goes out, turns on his car, boom, he’s not a good customer no more. I even gone to his funeral and cried, especially when I seen he had a pretty wife and a bunch of kids. Never did heard what that was all about. You boys ain’t have no enemies?”
“Just bums going after the recyclables,” Isaac said.
“There’s a bum in my recycling cart this afternoon. I chase him away. He tells me God loved me anyway.”
“I doubt it was him,” Howard said.
As they drove through town, keeping it to about fifteen miles per hour from fear of the gas tank and because of the shattered windshield, Isaac said, “You know, old Lenya will still be feeling generous about that rain check tonight, but she might not in a week. It’s only about three miles, we could walk back in an hour. I say we park this thing, walk on in, let Lenya spoil us, and maybe catch the last of Game Seven and have us a steak at Mary’s. Hitch a ride or take a cab after. It’s been a day.”
“Me too, on everything,” Howard said.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. NEAR THE BOUNDARY OF JAMMU WITH AKSAI CHIN. DISPUTED TERRITORY CLAIMED BY CHINA. INDIA, PAKISTAN. AND KASHMIRI SEPARATISTS. JUST BEFORE DAWN. LOCALLY. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
“Green Leader, Green Flight is authorized to cross over into Aksai Chin. The American satellites have laid you an intercept course at 321 degrees 9 minutes; we’re relaying it to your computer now—”
The flight leader passed orders to the other three planes in his flight. “Looks like we’re cleared to go get them.”
“How was it authorized so quickly?” Green Two, the pilot of one of the two fighters in the flight, asked.
Normally the flight leader would have reprimanded the excess chatter, but he was excited and nervous himself. “They told me the Americans told—not asked—Beijing and Islamabad to let us do this.”
The four Sukhoi jets of Green Flight flew on, high above the spectacular, deadly wastelands: the Aksai Chin, a flat, featureless saline desert surrounded by the high Himalayas. It could be reached by road for less than half the year, was more than three miles high with almost no rainfall, and offered death by thirst, starvation, or exposure at all times of year; three nations and one liberation movement claimed it, but not one of them would have expended a single life to maintain the claim.
China patrolled there more often than the other nations, but today India was there first with the requested flight of two fighters and two fast reconnaissance planes to the target. Swift agreement by all parties that this was strictly a favor to the Americans and reflected nothing else had been enabled by their shared perception that the United States was about to go utterly berserk.
Dawn overtook Green Flight. The old silver Sukhois glinted with steely fire in the abrupt daylight, and the missile pods on two of them, camera package on the third, and radar/communications boom on the leader stood out like diagrams of themselves.
“I have it on radar,” the flight leader reported. “Confirming orders: We are to secure as many photographs as feasible, while repeatedly warning them; if we are defied, or not answered, we are to shoot them down at the last feasible prudent time.”
“Those orders are confirmed, Green Leader.”
Feasible prudent time. I suppose it wouldn’t be prudent if it weren’t feasible, and maybe vice versa. Green Leader shrugged the thought off; the phrase was obviously just cover for his superiors if anything went wrong.
The high peaks off to their east dazzled them like monster flashbulbs as the morning sun found angles from glaciers and snowfields into the pilots’ eyes. Long, deep shadows extended across the salt plain below, crawling visibly back toward the mountains in the first moment of dawn. In late October, the mountains were piled high and deep with snow; they would have been snowcapped even in July, but for practical purposes that inaccessible, high, far land below them had been in winter for more than a month.
Coordinating with an American satellite operator, two of their own radar operators, and what must be an American observer relaying information from a Chinese or Pakistani radar, they moved in on the target. “Green Leader, this is Green Three.” That was the camera plane. “I have him on visual, Green Leader, proceeding to close with him.”
They turned to follow Three and then they all saw it: a white 737 flying at what must be about its max cruising altitude, gleaming white in the morning sun. In moments they had closed with the white plane and were circling it in the air like American Indians around a covered wagon in one of their old Westerns. The 737 neither deviated from its course nor answered any radio hails, though there was a soft hiss in one distress channel.