Nick stood in silent surprise, his heart hammering. For a long moment his eyes searched the darkness, and then he saw Cudjo crouched just inside the fence, his big hat slowly scanning left and right as he observed the guards. Then there was swift movement as he lay flat and rolled under the fence into the tall, untrimmed grass that grew beneath the wire.
For an instant, Cudjo was standing in the light outside the wire, frozen as if motionless. Then the man was gone.
Nick realized he was holding his breath, and he let the breath go hissing into the night. Creeping the goose. It had seemed uncanny, magical.
“My turn,” Nora muttered. Her eyes were wide, and there was a tremor in her voice.
“You don’t have to go,” Nick said. Nora was brave, he thought, she was lithe and fast. But she wasn’t magical. She wasn’t Cudjo.
Nora gave him a look. “Yes, I do.”
Nick saw her do as Cudjo had done, crouch low by the wire while she looked left and right at the deputies. Then she was down, rolling under the wire. And up, arms and legs pumping as she ran for the woods.
There was a sudden boom, the blast of a shotgun stunning the night, and Nora fell onto the earth, a sudden, limp tangle of awkward limbs. Nick’s stunned retinas retained an afterimage of bright blood staining the air.
He heard groans, cries from the people around him.
There was another shot, just to make certain Nora was dead.
Then more shots, this time into the wire. Shot whined off the chain link, strange Doppler noises. Nick was on the ground then, crawling into cover, so he never saw the deputy walk up to Nora, pull his pistol, and shoot her in the head.
Nick lay in the night, pulse throbbing in his skull. His nerves leaped with every sound. Finally he rose and made his silent way to the cookhouse, to finish building his bombs.
THIRTY-FOUR
As we were all wrapt in sleep, each tells his story in his own way. I will also relate my simple tale. At the period above mentioned, I was roused from sleep by the clamor of windows, doors and furniture in tremulous motion, with a distant rumbling noise, resembling a number of carriages passing over pavement—in a few seconds the motion and subterraneous thunder increased more and more: believing the noise to proceed from the N. or N.W. and expecting the earth to be relieved by a volcanic eruption, I went out of doors & looked for the dreadful phenomenon. The agitation had now reached its utmost violence. I entered the house to snatch my family from its expected ruins, but before I could put my design in execution the shock had ceased, having lasted about one and three fourth minutes. The sky was obscured by a thick hazy fog, without a breath of air. Fahrenheit thermometer might have stood at this time at about 35 or 40 (degrees).
Flash. Flash. Flash. The laser pulsed on Jessica’s retina.
“There.” The doctor’s voice. “Can you see anything now?”
Jessica covered her right eye. The doctor’s face floated toward her out of the darkness. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t know whether to be hopeful or not. “But it’s like tunnel vision.”
“I’ve just started.” Jessica lay back in the padded head-rest and felt the doctor lean over her. “I saw you on television the other day,” the doctor said. “With the President.”
“Yes.” Flash.
“What’s he really like?” Flash flash.
“I don’t know him well. I’ve only met him a couple times.” She smiled. “But he did appoint me to my job, so I think it’s obvious that he’s a great statesman.”
Flash. Flash flash flash.
“I voted for him,” the doctor said. “But it was just a stab in the dark, you know. You can’t really tell with those people.”
The first time Jessica had met the President, all she had felt was the man’s charisma. When he looked at you, your insides went all warm and tingly. You wanted to roll on your back and have him rub your tummy. Even for someone as professionally accustomed to alpha males as Jessica, the effect had been surprising.
All big politicians were like that, though. Jessica had met a few. They all carried that enormous top-dog energy. The lucky ones could project it on television.
This last time, though, the meeting on Poinsett Island, the President’s affect had been different. It wasn’t so much as that the glow wasn’t there, but that it had gone somewhere that Jessica couldn’t reach. Though there was nothing Jessica could put her finger on, she had the sense that, at least part of the time, the commander-in-chief wasn’t home.
Hey, she told herself. Give the guy a break. He’s just lost his wife. Flash. Flash flash.
She had lost the last of the vision in her left eye on the return helicopter trip to Vicksburg. The doctor, though, had been encouraging when he spoke to Pat on the telephone. Jessica had probably detached a retina. It sounded frightening—and Jessica was very frightened—but the doctor assured Pat that the retina could most likely be tacked back on with a laser.
To Jessica’s surprise, she didn’t have to check into a hospital. Unless there was some complication, the procedure could be done in the doctor’s office.
And that meant she wouldn’t have to be absent from her command for more than few hours. By the time the paperwork for the procedure caught up with the Army—and that would take a long while, given the current emergency—she would have been back at her work for weeks, if not months. Which meant that it would be far too late to question her presence at her job.
Flash flash flash. “The vitreal humor,” the doctor said conversationally, “that’s the jelly in the center of your eye. Well, it was probably pulling away from the retina—it happens to most of us as we get older. But in your case the vitreal humor pulled the retina away with it. Probably the earthquake tore everything loose.”
“Not the earthquake. It was a bumpy helicopter ride.”
The doctor was amused. “We don’t get many of those,” he said.
Flash flash flash.
“How’s that?”
Jessica blinked cautiously at the world. Reality seemed more or less intact.
“I can see,” she said in surprise.
“You may have lost some detail,” the doctor said. “Time will tell.”
“I—thank you, doctor. Thank you.”
“Lie back and let me take another tour of your eye,” the doctor said. “I want to check and make certain I haven’t missed something.”
“Certainly.” Jessica leaned back on the padded headrest.
“And another thing,” the doctor said. “No more helicopter rides.” Jessica felt herself smile. She had got here on a helicopter, a smoother ride than driving the torn road between Vicksburg and Jackson.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
“Okay,” said Armando Gurule, the electrician’s apprentice. “I’ve made this double safe. To set off the claymores, you’ve got to throw both these switches, right?”
“Right,” Nick said. He bit his lip, looked at the wires. “What if they cut power to the camp?” Armando gave a laugh. “They can’t. Look at the power line. They run their own floodlights off the same power source.”
Nick nodded. “Good.”
“So you throw the switches. And then all the claymores go at once. Boom.”
“Boom,” Nick agreed.
Nick blinked gum from his eyes. The sun was just beginning to rise behind the trees east of the camp. In the last hour of darkness he had buried his mines—he’d ended up with eleven—leaving nothing but the detonator wires sticking out of the ground. Armando had crawled after Nick and connected the wires to his homemade control board, then covered the gear with grass or bits of matting or plastic sheeting.