A jungle roar, thousands of voices, guttural, primal, ugly, enveloped the White House. He could hear the angry scourge of metal on metal, cars scraping, colliding, ramming on Pennsylvania Avenue. Horns blared everywhere. Gunfire popped far off and then, in bursts, nearby. Through the awful sound the President heard the familiar whumping of Nighthawk, another in his fleet of Sikorsky helicopters. He strained to see its reassuring outline. A few lights shone brightly, eerily, in the city. But all were doused on the White House lawn. The Secret Servicemen crouched around him, Sedgwick forcing him to hunch down too, and then the group started into the void.
Gunfire suddenly cracked several yards away from them. Tracer bullets raced across the grounds, briefly freeze-framing in Roman-candle red the figures of men clambering over the East Gate fence. The skeleton of his first helicopter was frozen there, too, gutted and wrapped around a winter-stark oak tree. Then the tracers, green, yellow, red, swept back toward them. Sedgwick hit him first, smothering him, and he felt another body, and another, pound him into the frozen ground. The air whooshed out of him. He heard grunts and a high-pitched ping! ping! like violin strings snapping. “Shit!” someone shouted. He elbowed at Sedgwick viciously, struggling for air.
“Take it easy, sir,” Sedgwick said. “Just stay down.”
“Who are those people?” the President demanded, gasping for breath.
“People, people, sir.” Sedgwick shrugged. “Who knows? Scared people, angry people, spooked people.”
“But they’ve got automatic weapons. Tracer bullets, for Christ’s sake!”
“Mr. President, the city of Washington is better armed than most armies. You know that. You can buy a bazooka in a pawn shop across the river in Arlington.”
“The American way,” the President said, tonelessly. Then his voice finned up. “It’s the American way, by God. Help them defend themselves in this moment of peril.”
Sedgwick remained silent.
“Why are they shooting at me?” the President asked, his voice ebbing.
“You’ve got the last train out of town, Mr. President. They just put a couple of holes in it, though.”
The agents crouched low in a circle around them. One talked urgently into his radio. “I know that, goddammit,” the agent growled. “Do you want him dead or alive? No, he does not have his vest on! He’s got his bathrobe on. Yes, I understand.” The agent edged up to the President. “We don’t have time to wait this out,” he said. “Can you see the chopper, Mr. President?”
The President turned his head toward the whump-whump-whump, picking out the shadow perhaps fifty yards away. Above the helicopter, the tiny red eyes of the Washington Monument winked at him, mocking him. “Yes,” he said to the agent.
“The marines are gonna open up in a few seconds. We’re gonna run. Head down. Full speed. No stopping. Run. Understand?
“Yes.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go, Mr. President.” It was Sedgwick. “Now!”
Guilt seized the President. His wife. In the past thirty minutes he had not asked about his wife. His nerves were bursting. He wanted to sleep. The world exploded again. He ran. At the bottom of the helicopter ramp, he stumbled. Two agents caught him and shoved him roughly, like cops with a drunk, up the stairs. Sedgwick held his arm. At the top a hand reached out and pulled them inside and the chopper immediately swept upward.
The two remaining agents pushed him into a rear seat and left him. Then Sedgwick careened into a seat across the aisle. The helicopter banked sharply over the trees, and out the window the President saw the omnipresent monument flash by as they headed for the familiar course down the river to Andrews. At the Fourteenth Street Bridge he gazed numbly down over a tangle of cars, hopelessly snarled in the desperation to head south. Across the river, fires burned on the runways at National Airport, smashed planes scattered across the broad tarmac.
“Lear jets,” a voice said. “Every lobbyist in town tried to get out at the same time.”
The President looked up slowly. An Air Force colonel leaned over him. The President remembered the last word Icarus had said to him.
“Geronimo,” he replied to the colonel.
“I suppose so, sir,” the colonel said uncertainly. “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is attempting to meet you at Andrews. He instructed me to inform you that our attack was carried out. Omaha went three minutes ago, Cheyenne thirty seconds later. Command has been assumed by the Looking Glass plane.”
“Alice,” the President said. But he was not thinking of the general. He was thinking of impossible dreams.
“Sir.” The colonel looked at him strangely. “It will be transferred to you, of course, if we reach the national command plane at Andrews.”
The President’s eyes stared, unfocused, at the colonel.
“The Soviets launched again, sir. Shortly after our response to their attack on the Chinese…”
A numbing electric spasm rippled through the President. Their attack on the Chinese? The colonel handed him a large tumbler of Scotch and continued.
“…Soviet ICBMs and a second shot from their submarines off the East Coast. We have to assume Andrews is targeted by the submarines. You can rest assured we retaliated, as you ordered.”
The President downed the Scotch, closed his eyes, and appeared to go to sleep.
Kazakhs held the plane on its southerly course till it was well beyond the cloud, then began a slow, banking tum west again. The altimeter read twenty-seven thousand feet and climbing. Soon he would bank the plane again, north this time, toward the Positive Control Point far ahead above the Arctic coast of Canada at which they would get the final orders to go in. Kazakhs felt good, very good. He had done his job well. By now he had placed the rest of the squadron far out of his mind. They would have separated soon anyway, this being a loner’s job, no security to be gained from the cluster target of a squadron. The Buff would go in low and alone, the loneliness being its security. Kazakhs guessed the target would be the primary, although they had practiced for six different Siberian cities. In his mind’s eye he could see the course as if he had flown it a hundred times, which, indeed, he had—in simulation. He could see the Buff’s white belly melding with the ice floes of the Arctic, ducking around the danger of the SAM base on the frozen coast near Tiksi, racing south over the snow-covered tundra, crisscrossing the Lena River, hiding at three hundred feet in the Verkhoyansk Mountains, breaking out low over the larch forests that hinted at the beginnings of civilization….
“It’s red-neckin’ twang! twang! luv-makin’ twang! twang! time…” The voice pounded into the pilot’s helmet, a scratchy electric guitar clawing at his eardrums.
“What the hell is that?!”
“Listen to the whippoorwills twang! how they sing twang! twang! Just like us, doin’ their thing! twang!”
“Psywar!” Kazakhs thundered. “Fucking Russians are trying to psyche us!”
“Conway Twitty,” Moreau replied camly. “Tyler’s trying to convince us.”
Kazakhs clasped his helmet in both hands, as if he were trying to smother the earphones. “Ty!” he bellowed. “Ler!” twang! twang! Ty-fucking-ler!”
“Tyler’s picked up a radio station,” Radnor said from below.
“Get that fucker off!”
“I knew you guys were wrong,” Tyler said serenely as Twitty’s twang wound down. “They’re alive down there. It’s a drill. All this is simulated. Just like everything else.”