When they finally sorted themselves out, now, at least three of them asked the inevitable question: “Are you sure?”
“My information is positive,” he told them. “There is no question of its accuracy.”
A half dozen, in various wordings, next asked him what they should do about it. He said, “The important thing to remember is that we won’t have Bradford’s cooperation. We can’t tell him we know what’s going on. If he knew what was up, he’d be in favor of it, he’d want to be kidnapped. So we have to take care of this without his help, and even without his knowledge. Not only can’t the Chinese capture him, we can’t let them get near enough to say a word to him.”
“How?” The question was general.
“We’ll have to discuss techniques,” Wellington told them. “But before that, I want to get back to the first subject, the plan for a really permanent solution to this problem.”
They wanted to stay with the kidnapping, and a number of them said so, but he shook his head and said, “I told you about that when I did because I wanted you all to understand the urgency of the situation and the danger we’re all in until we have Bradford safely and permanently controlled. But I want to talk about the plan now because I have to make that telephone call if we’re going ahead with it. There’s a lot that will have to be done.”
“All right,” Howard said irritably. “What’s the plan?”
“Yes,” Wellington said. He looked at them all, their faces cautious, curious, but at least potentially skeptical. He took a deep breath. He started to talk.
9
Like most towns of consequence dating from Colonial times, Lancashire, Pennsylvania, was founded on the banks of a river, that being then the most natural means of transportation. The river in this case was the Susquehanna, which meanders across the southern tier of New York State, down through eastern Pennsylvania, across a corner of Maryland, and empties at last into the top of Chesapeake Bay, between Baltimore and Wilmington.
The town of Lancashire, population thirty-four thousand, stands on the west bank of the Susquehanna, twenty-five miles north of Harrisburg, where the Turnpike goes through. Its principal products are canvas sporting goods and plastic dinnerware. It is the home of Lancashire University, a large multi-colleged state-supported educational center with twelve thousand students.
Seen from the air, Lancashire appears as a patchwork quilt, bunched against the curve of the river bank on its eastern edge, and then spread out to the left of that as though to dry. The cluttered, bunched-up section is downtown, with its old storefront buildings packed tightly together, its main street with angle parking on both sides, the recent black oblongs of parking lots, and the one unexpected swatch of green in front of City Hall. Away from downtown and the river, the town is composed of neat houses and neat lawns on a neat gridwork of streets. The high school, with its football field in back and concrete parking lot in front, stands out markedly from the rest of the grid, as do Lancashire Memorial Hospital and the two cemeteries, Holy Cross and Greenland.
Lancashire University is outside the town proper, making its own smaller grass-green and brick-red quilt on the southwestern outskirts. A north-south road, following the river, twice blessed with route numbers (11 and 15), separates the campus from the Susquehanna before entering the town to become River Street, the main downtown thoroughfare, and then emerging again at the north end of town, traveling between the river and Greenland Cemetery before passing the city limits and heading on northward for its mitosis across from Sunbury.
Within a forty-square-mile rectangle north and west of Lancashire, bordered by four secondary roads, one of them not even numbered, there is nothing but woods and an occasional farm. In a farmhouse in a wooded fold of hills in this section on the morning of Friday, the ninth of November, ten men sat and discussed their plans for the day. Two were Chinese, eight were American. The Americans were a dissident splinter group formed by recent disruptions within the Progressive Labor party, one of the old-time American Communist party schisms that had come into an unexpected belated flowering of prominence in the late sixties. Throughout the sixties, while Stalinist and Trotskyite schisms saw themselves fading into irrelevance and obsolescence, Progressive Labor was firmly Maoist, hitching its wagon to the star from the East and riding the wave of polarization into the seventies. China was Progressive Labor’s heaven then, as Russia had been for the equivalent radicals of the thirties. (“I have seen the future, and it works.”) With the death of Chairman Mao, and with China now in a strong anti-Mao reaction — much like Russia’s de-Stalinization period — Progressive Labor and the other American Maoist groups now considered China merely one more enemy in a world already swarming with opponents.
Not all the members of Progressive Labor, however, agreed with this policy. The cult-of-personality specter was raised again, party meetings grew louder and less coherent, and by now Progressive Labor was progressively factionalizing itself out of existence. The radical left, after a heady period of national and international influence in the late sixties, was bickering its way back into its more usual irrelevance.
The eight Americans in the farmhouse northwest of Lancashire were members of the Twelfth of July movement (TOJ), a splinter of a faction from a schism of Progressive Labor, so far removed from its origin that Progressive Labor hadn’t yet bothered to denounce it. The Twelfth of July movement, named after an obscure event in radical politics during the period when Progressive Labor was taking over the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), saw its true allegiance not to Mao, and certainly not to Progressive Labor, but to China, which it saw as the source of a world-wide revolutionary movement for peace and freedom and the end of capitalism.
The eight TOJ members were all young men in their early or middle twenties, all Caucasian, all looking like normal upper-middle-class young men, with neat clothing, cropped hair and shining beardless jaws. Until yesterday, however, they had looked much different: bearded, hairy, dressed either dirtily or extravagantly. They considered themselves to be currently in disguise, and all were proud of the sacrifice they had made in shaving and getting crew-cuts, and yet their faces, their personalities, their backgrounds, who they were, shone through much more clearly now than they had done before yesterday.
Their histories were all more or less the same. All had been college students during the sixties, all had been caught up in the adventure and challenge of a society to be changed by its brightest young, all had suffered police violence and arrest, most had been expelled from at least one college, all had made their sacrifices light-heartedly and without any real understanding of the consequences, and all by now understood what those consequences were. Society, in effect, had cast them out. There were no blacklists, there was no longer any organized harassment, but there didn’t need to be. They had police records, and they lacked college degrees, a combination that automatically closed the door to any employment appropriate to their class. With the working class firmly right-wing since 1968 and becoming more so with every passing month, it was very difficult for them to find jobs of any kind; no union would accept their membership applications, and no right-thinking American workingman (flag decal on car window) wanted to be associated with them.