After lunch, Rodgers had gone to the shooting range at Andrews. There were days when he could dance around a bull's-eye with a.45-caliber M3 grease gun and miss it every time. Then there were days when he could pick his teeth with a.22-caliber Colt Woodsman. Today had been one of those good days. After two hours of marksmanship that left Air Force personnel stunned, Rodgers visited his mother in the Van Gelder Nursing Home. She was no more lucid than she'd been since her stroke two years before. But he read to her, as he always did, her favorite Walt Whitman poems, then sat and held her hand. After he left, he met an old Vietnam buddy for dinner. Andrew Porter owned a chain of comedy clubs up and down the East Coast, and he made Rodgers laugh like no one else.
While they were drinking coffee and getting ready to pay the check, Rodgers's pager beeped. It was Assistant National Security Director Tobey Grumet. He used his cellular phone to call her back.
Tobey informed him of the New York bombing and of an emergency Oval Office meeting called by the President. Rodgers apologized to Porter and left at once.
As he raced along the highway, Rodgers's thoughts went to General Charles "Chinese" Gordon. Gordon's efforts to protect indefensible Khartoum from the fanatical hordes of the Mahdi were at once among the boldest and most insane military adventures in history. Gordon paid for his heroism with his life, taking a spear in the chest and having his head paraded around on a pike. But Rodgers knew that that was how Gordon had wanted to die. The Englishman had traded his life for the chance to tell a tyrant, "No. You can't have this place without a fight."
Rodgers felt the same way. No one was going to do something like this to his country. Not without a fight.
He listened to the news on the radio and spoke on the phone as he drove to the White House. He was glad he had something to do: it kept him from dwelling on the horror. There were over two hundred deaths. The East River was shut down to traffic, and the FDR Drive on Manhattan's east side would be closed for days while it was examined for structural damage, Other transit points were being checked for explosives— bridges, railroads, airports, highways, subways— meaning that the hub of the world's economy would be effectively shut down on Monday morning.
Op-Center's staff FBI liaison, Darrell McCaskey, phoned Rodgers and told him that the FBI had taken charge of the investigation and that Director Egenes would be at the meeting. McCaskey told Rodgers that the usual list of extremists had called to take credit for the bombing. But no one believed that the real perpetrator had come forward, and McCaskey had no opinion as to who the terrorist might be.
Rodgers also received a call from Assistant Deputy Director Karen Wong, who ran Op-Center on weekend evenings.
"General," she said, "I understand you've been called to a meeting."
"Yes, I have."
"Then here's some information you should take with you. As soon as Lynne Dominick in cryptology heard about the explosion, she took a fresh look at that bagel order from overseas. The timing and receiver location made it seem like a good fit."
"What did she find?"
"Knowing the outcome has allowed her to work backward," Wong said, "albeit very quickly. And it seems like a match. Assuming the last bagel represents the tunnel, she created a map. The rest of the order seems to be points in Manhattan— for example, places to deliver components of the bomb."
Then we'd be up against the Russians, he thought with dread. And if they were behind this, it would not be regarded as terrorism. It would be considered an act of war.
"Tell Lynne that was heads-up work," Rodgers said. "Memo her findings and secure-fax it to the Oval Office."
"Right away. There's something else, though, that's happened in St. Petersburg," she said. "We've just learned from Commander Harry Hubbard at DI6 in London that he lost two people there. The first one was yesterday afternoon, a veteran named Keith Fields-Hutton. He was outside the Hermitage, by the Neva, and suffered what the Russians say was a heart attack."
"A euphemism for 'We killed him,"' Rodgers said. "Was he checking on the studio?"
"Yes," Wong said. "He never got to phone a single report, though. That's how fast he was spotted and terminated."
"Thanks," Rodgers said. "Has Paul been briefed?"
"Yes," said Wong. "He called after he heard about the explosion. He asked to talk to you after the meeting."
"I'll phone him," Rodgers said as he pulled up to the sentry at the gate which led to the winding White House driveway.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When he was a boy growing up in the early 1950s, in the small town of Naryan-Mar on the Arctic Ocean, Sergei Orlov thought he would never treasure a sight more than he did the orange glow of the hearth in his parents' home as he trudged through the snow carrying two or three fish tucked in his canvas sack, caught in the small lake near his home. For Orlov, the glowing fireplace wasn't just a beacon in the cold, dark night. it was a bright and hopeful sign of life in a cold and barren wasteland.
Circling the earth in the late 1970s, flying five Soyuz missions that ranged from eight to eighteen days and commanding the last three, General Sergei Orlov saw something even more memorable. It was not something new. Dozens of cosmonauts had seen the earth from space. But whether they had described our world as a blue bubble, a beautiful marble, or a Christmas-tree ornament, they all agreed that seeing it gave them a new outlook on life. Political ideologies were no match for the power of that fragile globe. Space travelers realized that if humans had a destiny, it was not to fight for control of their home but to cherish its peace and warmth as they journeyed to the stars.
And then you return to earth, Orlov thought as he stepped from the number 44 bus on Nevsky Prospekt. The resolve and inspiration weaken as you're asked to do things in the name of country which you can't refuse. Russians don't refuse. Orlov's grandfather was a Czarist, yet he fought the White Russians during the Revolution. His father didn't refuse when he fought in the Second Ukrainian Front during the Second World War. It was for them, and not for Brezhnev, that he had trained a new generation of cosmonauts to spy on the United States and NATO forces from space as well as to work on new chemical poisons in zero gravity. He was trained to see the world not as the home of all humans but as a thing to be peeled and cut up and devoured in the name of a man called Lenin.
Then there are the parts coveted by men like Minister Dogin, he thought as he walked briskly along the boulevard. Though it was still early, workers were already arriving at the Hermitage to prepare it for the daily crush of tourists.
Though the Minister was affable enough, and seemed consumed by an almost narcotic contentedness when discussing Russian history, particularly the Stalin years, his worldview was out of step with the times. And when Dogin made his monthly trips to St. Petersburg, it seemed that the Minister's memories of the Soviet years became more and more idealized.
Then there were men like Rossky, who didn't appear to have any worldview. They simply enjoyed power and control. Orlov had been alarmed by Assistant Security Director Glinka's surreptitious call to the apartment. Glinka knew how to play both sides of the fence, but Orlov believed him when he said that Rossky's activities over the past twenty-four hours had been unusually secretive. It started when Rossky insisted on handling, himself, the trivial investigation of an intrusion alert the day before. It was followed by unlogged and coded computer communications to an operative in the field, not telling anyone where he was going, and mysterious dealings with a local coroner.