Then that intangible enemy had reached out and hit the old staging area at Omsk. People he knew personally had died, and the game had turned out to be real after all. Then things had begun to move with such speed that it all blurred. There was the ambush of the enemy planes, after which Taylor surprised him by asking his first name, then calling him Hank — that had been better than receiving a medal, coming in the lonesome hour it did. Then Meredith had dismissively ordered him to stay with the comms sets while he and one of the NCOs followed Taylor out to try to rescue the crew of the downed M-100. He had obeyed faithfully, as the noise of gunfire reached into the controlled environment of the ops cell, frightened by his helplessness to influence events, waiting. Then the NCO had failed to return, and the casualties found a place in the cramped compartment, and death seemed to be sneaking closer and closer. The arcade game stakes were rising uncontrollably.
And now this. Waiting again. In an atmosphere of death. Afraid and uncertain, with Colonel Taylor and Meredith gone off into the silence. What was happening out there? " Parker waited in the ops cell with Meredith's shop NCO, who was also an ops backup in the austere modem Army. Both men hated the ominous quiet, and they agreed on it out loud. But they could not bring themselves to say much else.
They sat. Waiting. Imagining.
What was going on?
Without warning, the strategic communications receiver came to life.
Parker scrambled to put on the headset, then his fingers reached clumsily for the unfamiliar controls. Usually, Meredith or Taylor worked this set. Before he had begun to master the situation, the call came again.
"Yes," Parker answered hastily, "this is Sierra."
"Hold for the President," the voice said.
A moment later, a voice Parker knew only from television broadcasts came through the earpieces.
"Colonel Taylor?" the smooth, instantly recognizable voice began, "Colonel Taylor, one of your subordinate commanders has just contacted us with an emergency message. Lieutenant Colonel Reno claims—"
"Uh, sir?" Parker interrupted, instantly regretting both that Taylor was not immediately at hand to rescue him and that, in the last election, he had voted for the other candidate. Somehow, he suspected that the President would be able to tell about the miscast ballot. "Sir, this isn't Colonel Taylor. I'm just…like an assistant. Colonel Taylor's outside."
"Oh," the President said. "Excuse me."
Indeterminate noises followed from the distant station. Like miniature moving men hurriedly cleaning out a doll-house. A new voice came up on the net:
"Soldier, this is General Oates. I want you to go find Colonel Taylor, wherever he is. The President of the United States wants to talk to him."
"Yes, sir," Parker said. He moved very, very quickly. Not bothering to search for his helmet, he launched himself out through the rear hatch and nearly collided with Meredith.
"Whoa," Meredith said. "Where're you going?"
"Major Meredith, sir? Where's Colonel Taylor? The President wants to talk to him."
Meredith seemed to take the news with reprehensible calm. He was well-dusted with snow, as though he had been standing outside for a long time. For a moment Parker did not even think Meredith had understood him correctly, and he opened his mouth to repeat his message.
Meredith beat him to it. "The colonel's over there. In the ops bird." He pushed past Parker into the waiting M-100.
Parker plunged through the blowing snow. He high-stepped and slapped his way through the cold, imagining vaguely that one wrong move would bring far worse punishments down upon his head than anything battle might devise. He wished he were a faster runner, and he wished he were not such a fool.
He rounded the back end of Lieutenant Colonel Heifetz's M-100 and hauled himself up through the open hatch without a pause. He was about to howl his news at Taylor when the scene inside the ops cabin froze the words on his lips.
Heifetz's personal crew — men Parker worked with every day and knew as well as shared duty allowed — lay ranked along the narrow floor. It was immediately apparent that they were all alive, and it was equally apparent that something was revoltingly wrong, although the details of the scene made no real sense to Parker. He had seen the image of the soldier sprawled in the snow, fooling his limbs at the sky, but he had assumed that the disjointed movements were the result of pain, of a wound. Now Parker was confronted with a cabin full of squirming bodies, each man making similarly inept movements without pattern or warning. There was a strong foul smell, and the nearest man made mewling noises that made Parker want to back right out of the hatch and get away.
"But the sight at the end of the cabin held him. Colonel Taylor sat upon the floor, cradling Heifetz's head in his lap. Taylor was whispering softly to the S-3, the way Parker whispered to his twin daughters when they were sick. The colonel smoothed his unbandaged hand back over Heifetz's thinning hair, repeating the gesture again and again.
Parker did not know what to do. Then he remembered in panic: the President.
"Colonel Taylor, sir," he said too loudly. "Sir, the President is on the line. The President wants to talk to you." Taylor looked up briefly. The fright-mask face was very calm, almost expressionless.
"Tell him I'm busy."
PART IV
The Journey's End
20
Daisy listened. She wanted to speak, but could find no words. She wanted to act, but there was nothing to be done. Everything had gotten out of control. They had failed. She had failed. All of the careful intelligence analysis had turned out to be a joke. And the Japanese had kept the punchline hidden until it was too late. Now it was all over, and the only thing she could do was to listen.
"Mr. President, it's time to throw in the towel," the secretary of state said. He was a dignified old man who consciously cheapened his speech whenever he spoke to Waters, employing catchphrases and slang otherwise foreign to his tongue. "We gave it our best shot, and we missed. Now it's time to cut our losses. I'm certain we can negotiate a safe withdrawal for the remainder of our forces in the Soviet Union."
Daisy looked appraisingly at the President. The smooth, photogenic face had gone haggard, and the man looked far older than his years. She knew that the President suffered from high-blood pressure, and it troubled her. The Vice President was an intellectual nonentity who had only been placed on the ticket because he was a white southerner from an established political family — the perfect counterbalance for Jonathan Waters, who was black, northern, and passionately liberal. The election ploy had succeeded at the polls, but Daisy dreaded the thought of a sudden incapacitation of Waters. For all his ignorance of international affairs and military matters, Daisy could not suppress the instinctive feeling that the President's judgment was sound, while that of the men who served him was increasingly suspect. The Vice President was, perhaps, the most hopeless of the lot. Even now, with the nation's armed forces in combat overseas, Vice President Maddox was plodding on with the original itinerary of a tour of environmentally threatened sites on the West Coast. He would not even be back in the District until early the next morning.
Daisy certainly did not agree with all of the President's decisions. But she was convinced that his incorrect decisions were made with the best intentions, while the motives of his closest advisers were too often shaped by self-interest or parochialism. Watching the man age before her eyes, Daisy hoped he would take the measures that had become so evidently necessary as quickly as possible, then rest.