She was dead before she hit the floor.
In less than ten minutes the bodies were buried in a large drift behind the cabin and the bloodied snow shoveled away.
“Pathfinder patrol,” the leader said in terse Russian into his hand radio. He sat in the same seat Arnold Jones had occupied fifteen minutes earlier. “Objective secure.”
“Casualties?” It was the voice of Colonel Vorashin.
“Two noncombatants. Instructions?”
There was a pause, then: “Hold until contact.”
THE WHITE HOUSE
0859 HRS
The view from the Truman Balcony of the Rose Garden was one of crystalline bleakness; a glaze of frozen sleet encrusted all the trees, and they reflected the morning’s gray, overcast light dully. President Thomas McKenna sat alone in his favorite easy chair with a cup of coffee balanced on one of its arms.
Sections of the day’s New York Times and Washington Post were strewn over a small side table from a stack of unread newspapers. McKenna chuckled at the political cartoon in the Post — a masked caricature of him wearing a battered white hat and empty six-gun holsters, sitting on a crate marked WHEAT and facing an angry Russian bear. The caption read: “No, no. I’m Kemosabe, you’re the Indian.” Thomas Kyle McKenna was a forty-seven-year old man who found humor where he could these days.
As the forty-first president, he was neither generally beloved nor universally despised, depending upon whom you asked. Unlike his immediate predecessor he was exceptionally healthy, which was probably his single attribute that friend and foe could agree on without a congressional committee to verify. Not that it wasn’t discussed. But Thomas McKenna’s state of health wasn’t so much an issue, he thought glibly, as was his state of mind. As vice-president for twenty-one months, he’d dropped out of sight, politically, as if he’d fallen down a very deep well. When President Daniel Churchill Thorpe died suddenly of a heart attack (Thorpe had been a vigorous sixty-six. While his death was certainly sudden, it was a monumental shock to the nation when it was eventually disclosed that this was his third attack in seventeen years), McKenna was hoisted out of the well and reexamined in the severe light of day.
Nobody could prevent him from becoming president, though there were several party bosses who prayed that option was somehow available.
McKenna was most things Dan Thorpe had not been. He was young, a widower, not a war hero, liberal-minded and a former governor of a rural western state who had no congressional experience. He was sensitive and quietly intelligent where Thorpe had been simply smart and unbending the way a predatory animal is smart and lethal. But for precisely the reasons that he was unlike Thorpe, he was politically attractive for second slot on the presidential ticket. Thorpe had been — the Rock” and McKenna “the Face” (“the tits and ass element of Thorpe’s traveling political show,” one journalist had crudely dubbed McKenna during the campaign). After the election, Thorpe immediately began restructuring foreign policy with an eye to strengthening alliances, particularly NATO, in a move to check the Soviets. His reinstitution of the grain embargo had taken a heavy toll on the Russians in the wake of their worst grain harvest since the revolution. President Thorpe was born to face down the Russians, supporters had said. For the twenty-one months he lived in the White House, he was an ever-present challenge to their aggressions, and his announcement that he was seriously considering selling arms technology to the Chinese struck a raw Russian nerve. A test of wits and cunning was coming in this nuclear monopoly game, and Thorpe was the man to have on your side. Everybody knew that.
Nobody dreamed he would die, of course. Now McKenna was president. It v* as a lousy trick, McKenna thought, him dying like that.
A short man hurried into the room. Wayne Kimball was always in a hurry. He had graduated first in his law class at Princeton in 1968, delivered the valedictory address and had been running ever since. He was an immaculate dresser with a decided preference for gray pin-striped suits which, he thought, befitted his station as White House chief of staff.
“Breakfast, Mr. President. Richard Hickman’s already started in the study. If you want anything before he consumes it all, you’d better move your ass.” Kimball took the coffee cup and saucer and set them on the stack of papers.
“That was my breakfast, Wayne.”
“Up, please. Where’s your jacket?”
McKenna pointed it out on the back of a chair. Kimball retrieved it and helped the president into the sleeves. “You’re the chief of staff, Wayne, not a valet.”
“I get no respect. C’mon. It’s nine O’clock and—” Kimball stopped as McKenna turned toward him, staring at the president’s tie. “Jesus Christ! Where did you shoot that thing?” McKenna laughed. “Like it? Judge Stevenson picked it out.”
“Out of what?” Kimball shook his head. “That lady may be a brilliant jurist and”—he shrugged—”and whatever else, but she hasn’t got the slightest appreciation of what a presidential image should be.”
“I guess that comes under the heading of separation of powers.”
“Jokes? Jokes I get the first thing in the morning?”
McKenna buttoned his jacket. “So, what’s on today? Soft, I hope.”
“None.” Kimball checked through a small leather-bound appointment book. “Briefing in twenty minutes, the regulars.”
“Who’s priority?”
“Farber, National Security.”
“Jules Farber,” McKenna said wearily. “I seem to spend my life with Jules Farber.”
“Dick Hickman for breakfast,” Kimball read from the notebook.
“And?”
“I suspect he wants you to announce.”
“Too soon.”
“Dick doesn’t think so.”
“Dick Hickman is a born campaign manager. That’s the way he has to think. Luckily, he doesn’t make the decisions. He’d have had me announcing the day Thorpe died, preferably the moment after I was sworn in.”
“He thinks the great man is still president, you know. You’re just sort of renting space until he returns.”
“A lot of people have the same idea. When a president dies in office, especially someone like Dan Thorpe, people feel a terrifying loss, and they resent the poor schmuck who happens to be vice-president.”
“You’re not resented.”
McKenna smiled. “I’d rather you’d said I wasn’t a schmuck.” He nodded at the notebook. “What else?”
“The devil’s bitch at nine fifteen.”
“Translate that, please.”
“Dorothy Longworth. You promised her an interview and now it’s time to pay up.”
“It won’t be that bad. She may be a vitriolic bitch, but she’s a polite vitriolic bitch. Dick doesn’t know she’s here, I hope. He’d have a go at her skinny neck if he did.”
“No, she’s having coffee in the library. Stealing us blind, probably.”