“I don’t think they’ll make it,” the president snapped.
“Then, if not, we have no leverage. You have no problem. But”—his eyes found McKenna’s—”how did you say it… fat chance?”
“I think you have totally miscalculated the American people,” McKenna retorted.
“I am only concerned with the American leadership.”
The president shook his head. “Big mistake. Whatever you have been taught, whatever you have heard, the American people, sooner or later, are their own leaders.”
“Then it is to their best interest not to push the Soviet people further into desperation. Grain is less expensive than lives, I think.”
“If that’s a threat—”
“Please, Mr. President.” Gorny leaned back in his seat. “I have no desire to break off our talk, but I do not know how much more productive continuing this discussion can be if you insist on rejecting our offer out of hand.”
“Shall we at least agree to consider or reconsider our positions?”
The chairman smiled. “Meaning you’d like me to reconsider?”
“Of course. Besides, you knew I wasn’t going to swallow”—he nodded at the document—”that.”
Gorny didn’t answer. He glanced at Rudenski.
“Wouldn’t you feel much better,” McKenna said, “if you could inform your Central Committee that the American president is being very steady in this explosive affair?”
“Yes,” Gorny said flatly. “I’d feel better.”
“Then it’s done. The issue is frozen for, say, twelve hours. But no longer — we will not accept a fait accompli on our territory. You instruct your column to stop and I’ll guarantee no gunplay. Fair?”
Gorny glanced quickly at Rudenski. The external affairs minister made no acknowledgment. Gorny licked his lower lip. “I will be in touch with you as soon as I have contacted the field commander, Mr.
President,” he said. “It is best not to make promises until all concerned have been properly instructed.”
“But you will call me immediately?”
Gorny nodded. “Of course.”
“Good.” The president let out a sigh. “I assume it’s to your benefit as well as mine to keep this entire affair within the group that has been coping with it thus far?”
“You want me to help you keep news of this… situation away from the American public?”
“That would be very much in your interest, Mr. Chairman. The American public does not know you to be an intelligent and rational man as I do. They are very stubborn and romantic about their country.
And they might not understand this situation as well as you and I. They would see the contest in Alaska in a different light.”
“Contest? Do you think it is a contest, Mr. President?”
“In a way, yes. But the people would see it differently. They don’t like to lose.”
“Then go home, Mr. President… see that no one loses”
“And you, Mr. Chairman, see that we have nothing to lose.”
They rose together and shook hands, then turned and walked in separate directions to their respective entourages of bodyguards.
Within five minutes the basketball gymnasium was dark and empty with only the occasional loose window-panes in the ceiling to rattle in the wind and echo softly between the walls.
JONES’S STRIP
Three mortar rounds exploded on the runway at precisely 0200 hrs, disintegrating the moored helicopter in half a second. Two more hit the hangar, splitting its corrugated sheet-metal walls as if they were made from cardboard, crashing them inward. Another explosion caved in the roof of the Quonset hut beside the cabin. The blasts’ concussions collapsed Caffey’s bed as he was rolling out of it.
The clatter of machine-gun fire followed. A burst blew out a window and killed the generator as Caffey scrambled into the Joneses’ living room. The lights went out.
“They doubled back!” Caffey screamed. “The bastards doubled back!” He searched through broken glass for his M-16 as picture frames danced on the wall and crashed to the floor from the rain of bullets. Through the shattered window he could see the hangar. It was burning. “Parsons!”
“Here, Colonel!”
“Get on the talkie! Get the men out!” The room was suddenly freezing. Shredded curtains flapped in protest as snow and wind shrieked into the cabin. The temperature dropped fifty degrees in ten seconds.
Caffey found his parka. “Kate!”
“Here!”
He ran in a crouch to the radio bench. The operator was dead in his chair. Kate was huddled in the corner, under her parka. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I—”
“Put that goddamn coat on!” He reached up and pulled the PRC-41 from the operator’s desk. “Keep this out of harm’s way… we lose the radio and we are dead.”
“Colonel!” Parsons yelled. He had the door cracked and was on the floor with the walkie-talkie.
Caffey ran to him. Through the crack he could see the hangar blinking in bright relief. The night was suddenly filled with flares; tossed and tumbled by the whipping wind, their flickering brilliances cast the battleground with a grotesque kinetoscope effect. Like bumbling actors from a film clip of a Mack Sennett comedy, GIs danced hideously to death in apparent slow motion. The Russians cut them down individually and in groups as they came pouring out of the burning hangar.
Caffey grabbed Parsons by the arm and slung him down as the two-day-old lieutenant tried to run to his men.
“Let me go!” Parsons shouted. “Those are my men! They’re slaughtering them!”
“Stay down!” Caffey shouted back.
Another mortar round collapsed the two remaining walls of the hangar. Then the flares burned out. One by one they burned out or dropped sizzling into the snow. Almost as quickly as it had been brilliantly light, it was dark again. The mortars stopped. The heavy weapons fire stopped. For the few seconds before they heard the screams of the dying, there was only the sound of the wind.
“Now!” Caffey said. He pushed the door open and led the way. He ran south in a flanking movement to cut the raiding party off from the good helicopter, parked at the other end of the runway. That chopper was their only means of transportation out of this hellhole, Caffey knew. He had to get to it before they sent up more flares. There was a machine gun on it, besides. If he could work his way behind them with that gun…
Caffey was gasping for breath and searing his lungs in the frigid air as he made it to the Huey. Parsons and two other officers were on his heels. Without a word between them they loosened the gun from its swivel mount and lugged it and three tins of ammunition to a sandbag position. Then they waited.
The second round of flares didn’t come. They waited twenty minutes, but there was no more shooting.
No one launched another mortar. They waited until it was too cold to hold the trigger anymore.
The attack was over.
“Where did they go?” Parsons asked. “Why didn’t they come in for the kill?”
Caffey shook his head. He stared into the darkness to the east. “I don’t know,” he said bitterly. “I don’t fucking know… maybe we are dead.”
AIR FORCE ONE
2355 HRS
The jet engines droned through the darkness outside in melancholy harmony. The president of the United States woke from a light sleep, blinking rapidly until he’d oriented himself. He was alone in the main cabin, sitting at his place at the small conference table where he’d fallen asleep against the double-sealed plastic window. A Military Contingency Profile (MCP) lay open in his lap. His reading light was on.
McKenna had had one of those nightmares again. It was 1978 and he was outside Lydia’s hospital room. He’d run from the governor’s mansion, in his dream, all the way across the state. The doctor was the same doctor he’d known in every other dream because it was the same doctor in real life. The pained expression on his face never changed. Neither did the words. “I’m sorry, Governor. She’s slipping away. AH we can do is make your wife comfortable, and wait.” She died in his arms, but that was the dream. Actually, she’d lingered on for another day and a half, connected to all the tubes and strobes that couldn’t do anything but monitor the cancer’s damage and report what everyone already knew was happening. He wasn’t there at the end. Nobody was there, just the machines. That’s why he had the nightmare, McKenna thought — to remind him of his guilt when he woke up. The dream was the fantasy, how he wanted it to be. You don’t let something precious slip away from you without a fight, his subconscious seemed to be telling him. It wasn’t like you were putting a pet to sleep. You should have been there. He should have, but he wasn’t.