The Colonel’s phone bleeped again. He grabbed for it, eager and ready for his brother’s voice.
Wrong again. Not Mike. This was a hearty booming unfamiliar voice, one that said, “Anson? Anson Carmichael? Lloyd Buckley here!”
“I’m sorry,” the Colonel said, a little too quickly. “I’m afraid I don’t know—”
Then he placed the name, and his heart began to pound, and a prickle of excitement began running up and down his back.
“Calling from Washington.”
I’ll be damned, the Colonel thought. So they haven’t forgotten about me after all!
“Lloyd, how the hell are you? You know, I was just sitting here fifteen minutes ago hoping you’d call! Expecting you to call.”
It was only partly a lie. Certainly he had hoped Washington would call, though he hadn’t actually expected anything. And the name of Lloyd Buckley hadn’t been one of those that had gone through his mind, although the Colonel realized now that it really should have been.
Buckley, yes. Big meaty red-faced man, loud, cheery, smart, though perhaps not altogether as smart as he thought himself to be. Career State Department man; during the latter years of the Clinton administration an assistant secretary of state for third-world cultural liaison who had done diplomatic shuttle service in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Seychelles, and other post-Cold War hot spots, working closely with the military side of things. Probably still working in that line these days. A student of military history, he liked to call himself, brandishing the names of Clausewitz, Churchill, Fuller, Creasy. Fancied himself something of an anthropologist, too. Had audited one semester of the course that the Colonel had taught at the Academy, the one in the psychology of non-western cultures. Had had lunch with him a few times, too, seven or eight years back.
“You’ve been keeping up with the situation, naturally,” Buckley said. “Pretty sensational, isn’t it? You’re not having any problem with those fires, are you?”
“Not here. They’re a couple of counties away. Some smoke riding on the wind, but I think we’ll be okay around here.”
“Good. Good. Splendid.—Seen the Entities on the tube yet? The shopping-mall thing, and all?”
“Of course. The Entities, is that what we’re calling them, then?”
“The Entities, yes. The aliens. The extraterrestrials. The space invaders. ‘Entities’ seems like the best handle, at least for now. It’s a nice neutral term. ‘E-T’ sounds too Hollywood and ‘Aliens’ makes it sound too much like a problem for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”
“And we don’t know that they’re invaders yet, do we?” the Colonel said. “Do we? Lloyd, will you tell me what the hell this is all about?”
Buckley chuckled. “As a matter of fact, Anson, we were hoping you might be able to tell us. I know that you’re theoretically retired, but do you think you could get your aging bones off to Washington first thing tomorrow? The White House has called a meeting of high honchos and overlords to discuss our likely response to the—ah—event, and we’re bringing in a little cadre of special consultants who might just be of some help.”
“That’s pretty short notice,” the Colonel heard himself saying, to his own horror. The last thing he wanted was to sound reluctant. Quickly he said: “But yes, yes, absolutely yes. I’d be delighted.”
“The whole thing came on pretty short notice for all of us, my friend. If we have an Air Force helicopter on your front lawn at half past five tomorrow morning to pick you up, do you think you could manage to clamber aboard?”
“You know I could, Lloyd.”
“Good. I was sure you’d come through. Be outside and waiting for us, yes?”
“Right. Absolutely.”
“Hasta la manana,” Buckley said, and he was gone.
The Colonel stared in wonder at the phone in his hand. Then he slowly folded it up and put it away.
Washington? Him? Tomorrow?
A great goulash of emotions surged through him as the realization that they had actually called him sank in: relief, satisfaction, surprise, pride, vindication, curiosity, and five or six other things, including a certain sneaky and unsettling measure of apprehensive-ness about whether he was really up to the job. Fundamentally, he was thrilled. On the simplest human level it was good, at his age, just to be wanted, considering how unimportant he had felt when he had finally packed in his career and headed for the ranch. On the loftier level of Carmichael tradition, it was fine to have a chance to serve his country once more, to be able to make oneself useful again in a time of crisis.
All of that felt very, very good.
Provided that he could be of some use, of course, in the current—ah—event.
Provided.
The only way that Mike Carmichael could keep himself from keeling over from fatigue, as he guided his DC-3 back to Van Nuys to load up for his next flight over the fire zone, was to imagine himself back in New Mexico where he had been only twenty-four hours before, alone out there under a bare hard sky flecked by occasional purple clouds. Dark sandstone monoliths all around him, mesas stippled with sparse clumps of sage and mesquite, and, straight ahead, the jagged brown upthrusting pinnacle that was holy Ship Rock—Tse Bit’a’i, the Navajo called it, the Rock with Wings—that spear of congealed magma standing high above the flat arid silver-gray flatness of the desert floor like a mountain that had wandered down from the moon.
He loved that place. He had been entirely at peace there.
And to have come back from there smack into this—frantic hordes jamming every freeway in panicky escape from they knew not what, columns of filthy smoke staining the sky, houses erupting into flame, nightmare creatures parading around in a shopping-mall parking lot, Cindy a captive aboard a spaceship from another star, a spaceship from another star, a spaceship from another star—
No. No. No. No.
Think of New Mexico. Think of the emptiness, the solitude, the quiet. The mountains, the mesas, the perfection of the unblemished sky. Clear your mind of everything else.
Everything.
Everything.
He landed the plane at Van Nuys a few minutes later like a man who was flying in his sleep, and went on into Operations HQ.
Everybody there seemed to know by this time that his wife was one of the hostages. The officer that Carmichael had asked to wait for him was gone. He wasn’t very surprised by that. He thought for a moment of trying to go over to the ship by himself, to get through the cordon and do something about getting Cindy free, but he realized that that was a dumb idea: the military was in charge and they wouldn’t let him or anybody else get within a mile of that ship, and he’d only get snarled up in stuff with the television interviewers looking for poignant crap about the families of those who had been captured.
Then the head dispatcher came over to him, a tanned smooth-featured man named Hal Andersen who had the look of a movie star going to seed. Andersen seemed almost about ready to burst with compassion, and in throbbing funereal tones told Carmichael that it would be all right with him if he called it quits for the day and went home to await whatever might happen. But Carmichael shook him off. “Listen, Hal, I won’t get her back by sitting in the living room. And this fire isn’t going to go out by itself, either. I’ll do one more go-round up there.”
It took twenty minutes for the ground crew to pump the retardant slurry into the DC-3’s tanks. Carmichael stood to one side, drinking Cokes and watching the planes come and go. People stared at him, and those who knew him waved from a distance, and three or four pilots came over and silently squeezed his arm or rested a hand consolingly on his shoulder. It was all very touching and dramatic. Everybody saw himself as starring in a movie, in this town. Well, this one was a horror movie. The northern sky was black with soot, shading to gray to the east and west. The air was sauna-hot and frighteningly dry: you could set fire to it, Carmichael thought, with a snap of your fingers.