In the beginning, during her first few years of public life, Wilson had discounted her feelings, telling close friends that they were nothing more than silly emotions that she needed to master. But as her political career blossomed and she grew in both importance and ability, Wilson also matured and found that she didn't need to deny herself or her emotions. For she found that, like the spring storm, an occasional venting of her fears or anger in private served to release her tensions and cleanse her soul in the same way that a spring storm unleashes the pent-up fury of the heavens and makes way for the cool, fresh calmness that inevitably follows.
So Wilson chose not to sit in the War Room with key members of her staff like mourners attending a wake. Instead she stayed in her private apartments and allowed her emotions and thoughts free rein for a while. In a few hours she would need to be in complete control of herself, for it would be in the aftermath of the operation to take back the nuclear weapons from the Germans, an operation that was about to commence several thousand miles away, while the wounded were still being tended to and the dead counted, that her struggle would begin.
In her wanderings, Wilson came to the window and stopped. Looking out, she could see the lights of the city that lit the streets and the many imposing statues and monuments that made the city of Washington an open-air museum. Even at this hour there was a fair amount of traffic, something that never ceased to amaze her. She still didn't understand cities, even after living in Denver for years and now Washington. They were alien places with their own rules, their own codes of ethics, their own ways of life.
In many ways, Wilson thought, her inability to understand the city was like her ignorance of the innermost psychology that drove the military machine that she now commanded. While the organizational charts and mission statements of each of the services and units were simple to understand and their use easily explained, she lacked a real appreciation of what it meant to be a soldier or an airman or a sailor. Nothing in all her years of college, life as a mother, member of Colorado's leading law firm, and governor of that state gave her any idea of what motivated young men and women to place themselves with such casualness into harm's way in defense of a vague idea, a principle. How shallow such words as duty, honor, country, must seem when facing death. Or were they shallow? Was there real meaning in those words that only a person faced with his or her own mortality could really understand and appreciate?
Leaning her head against the window, Wilson felt the coldness of the glass against her warm forehead. When she had been a young girl in Colorado and her head seemed so full of troubled thoughts that it appeared that it must burst, she would go over to the window and place her head against the pane of glass. Somehow, in the mysterious ways that elude explanation or logic, the image of the soft, quiet landscape and the feeling of the cold glass against her brow served to calm her.
There was nothing more to do. She had done what she had felt was right. Now it was up to others to do what was necessary, leaving her to deal with her emotions alone and prepare for the consequences of her decisions.
With every turn of his staff car's tires, he rolled closer to the front gate of the storage site. Seated in the front passenger seat clutching the assault rifle that lay across his lap, Ilvanich could feel his heart beat louder, more violently. Though he tried not to, his eyes remained fixed on the muzzle of a machine gun that protruded from the aperture of a concrete bunker that sat next to the front gate. Ilvanich knew that behind that gun there was a young German soldier, a paratrooper, with his finger wrapped around the trigger and his gaze fixed along the sights of the machine gun that was locked on his vehicle. In silence, while Sergeant George Couvelha seated to his left drove them forward at a steady, unrelenting pace, Ilvanich waited for the machine gun to fire. At this range there was little doubt that both he and Couvelha would perish in the first volley. Yet there was nothing he could do. It had to be this way. It was expected of him. He had known all of his life that nothing less would be acceptable.
Still, sheer terror that tried to wrestle away Ilvanich's sanity couldn't be denied. It was like the feeling of helplessness he got when he sat in the front seat of a roller coaster. Slowly, with mechanical precision, the roller coaster was cranked up the first incline. Ilvanich hated roller coasters, hated them with a passion. To please a girl he was with or a little nephew he was entertaining, however, he would always go, as was expected of him. There would be when the lead car reached the top nothing but sheer terror, panic that Ilvanich was expected to master because he was, in the eyes of those with him, the strong one. Today, as on those occasions, there was no other place he could be. He was where he was expected to be and nothing and no one could change that. It was his fate, and he accepted it in silence.
At the command post that served as the headquarters for the 2nd Battalion, 26th Parachute Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Jakob Radek greeted the news that there was a convoy of trucks carrying troops approaching the front gate with a great sigh of relief. His pleas to Colonel Haas, his brigade commander, had been heard. It had been a stupid decision to strip away one of his companies and send it to Berlin for riot control just when the Americans were growing closer and the danger of a strike against the storage sites was at its greatest. Radek knew it. And Haas knew it.
In stormy conversations, both when he had received the order early the night before and again not more than three hours ago, Radek had told Haas exactly what he thought of the decision, not to mention the fools in Berlin who had placed such a demand on him. Though he knew he had been wrong to do so, it was, he felt, necessary to make his protest in the strongest possible terms. That Haas, or one of the idiots in Berlin, had finally come to his senses and realized what he had done didn't surprise Radek. Without further thought, he ordered the sergeant of the guard at the gate to have the company commander of the returning company report immediately to his office. Radek was anxious to get his third company back into the defensive positions inside the inner secure area where the nuclear weapons were stored. Hanging up the phone, he finally felt that he could breathe easy. Given the choice of having a strong force in the inner secure area at the expense of weakening his outer perimeter, Radek had opted for the strong outer perimeter. Since it was his mission, after all, to keep the Americans away from the nuclear weapons, it made perfect sense to Radek that the further away from the inner secure area he could keep the Americans the better. Besides, he reasoned, if the outer perimeter broke at some point, he could always withdraw units on the outer perimeter that were not under pressure into the inner secure area. That this gamble in deployment of his forces would never be put to the test was for Radek a great relief.
At the gate the sergeant of the guard looked at the receiver of the telephone, then at the corporal who stood across from him. Radek's last instructions, in light of the standing orders that no one under any circumstances was to be allowed in, did not make any sense at all. Of course, pulling one of the companies away from the battalion and sending it to Berlin for riot duty didn't make sense either. Carefully replacing the receiver, the sergeant looked at the convoy, now less than fifty meters away, and then back to the corporal. He shook his head before he gave an upward motion of his arm, the signal to his men to remove the barriers at the gate and let the convoy through.