“Hold it, Habib T.,” cautioned President Turnbull.
“One catastrophe is all I can handle right now. Are you telling me that this damned heat wave is going to get worse because of the black cloud?”
“No question about it. But the heat is not the whole story. When it rains, it will combine with the combustion products of the burning coal, producing dilute nitric and carbonic acids and other pollutants.”
“Acid rain?”
“Like aqua regia coming out of a firehose. Clothing will rot on our backs and off the clotheslines, exposed skin will blister, well and spring water will become un-drinkable, and stone buildings will dissolve in front of our eyes-eyes that will constantly stream with tears from the acrid pollution.”
President Horatio Francis Turnbull meditated on the implications of what his aide had told him. The Americans were helpless. They could hardly declare war on Russia for rendering the air unspeakably foul, because Ripley Forte, a Texican-American dual national, was ultimately responsible for the environmental disaster, not the Russians. The Russians could now rest on their oars and let America drown in acid rain, let its crops be scorched in acid rain, let its proud buildings be dissolved in acid rain and dribble down its acid rivers to the sea.
“That bastard Forte,” Turnbull thundered, wheeling on his hapless Marine aide. “He’s the one that persuaded me to allow that Lieutenant Colonel Haperman into the White House. I’ll have his hide if it’s the last thing I do on earth!”
“Excuse me, sir,” protested General Noonie, “but if I may say so, you’re being unjust.”
“You may not. The man has brought this country to the brink of extinction, and I’m going to bring him to trial on charges of high treason.”
“Forte didn’t do it,” Noonie persisted. “He couldn’t have. The whole scheme must somehow have been engineered in Russia, probably by the seventeen missing American scientists.”
“How do you figure that?” said Turnbull, suddenly wary. When Major General Habib T. Noonie contradicted the president so firmly, it was usually for good reason.
It was simple, Noonie explained. Forte had indeed engineered the laser shots that ignited Russia’s summer wheat crop. But within forty-eight hours, the first signs of smoke from the burning lignite mines had appeared over Siberia. The Russians could have set fire to a thousand mines that contained a tremendous national resource only after long and careful consideration. They never made such far-reaching decisions on the spur of the moment, as the United States often did. That meant that it was all part of a long-standing Russian plan, in which Ripley Forte had unknowingly been persuaded to play a leading role.
President Turnbull demurred. “That line of thinking rests on the programs and data Forte made available to us. They showed he maneuvered the iodine lasers into zapping the wheat fields, and only the wheat fields, during the thirty-seven seconds he had control of the SDI system. But he could have cooked the readouts. He might just as easily have zapped those 870 lignite mines to boot.”
“Beg to differ, sir. The shallowest of those mines lies tens of meters beneath the surface. The energy powering those orbiting lasers is not a fraction of that needed to penetrate the dirt overburden. Those fires were set. And only the Russians themselves could have set them….”
By the fifteenth of July, the situation in North America was becoming desperate. The Canadians were worst hit, but the black cloud that covered the regions of the United States in which more than three-quarters of the population lived also cast the long shadow of economic hardship, respiratory ailments, depression-Americans now began to learn why so many Swedes commit suicide during their long winter nights-discord over diminishing reserves of food and clean water and, among those who panicked easily, outright hysteria.
It was the Russians who suggested a remedy for America’s ills. From a very unofficial but authoritative Russian government source, a message was brought to President Turnbull suggesting that if the Americans stopped stonewalling and handed over Ripley Forte immediately, it would be a great morale booster in the Soviet Union. His trial, conviction, and hanging might, indeed, inspire the laboring masses to the superhuman effort needed to extinguish the fires the running dog of Westheimer Avenue had set.
On receipt of the message, President Turnbull summoned Ripley Forte to Washington. He showed him the communication.
“What are you going to do, Mr. President?” Forte asked.
“What can I do?” replied Turnbull helplessly. “We all know the Russians are liars. They’ll hang you, and somehow not be able to extinguish those fires, and have the laugh on us while admiring your alopecic scalp nailed to the outhouse door.”
“Well, then?”
“But maybe not. There’s a chance in a thousand- make that a million-that they’re on the level this time. And, you see, I can’t afford not to do everything possible to make them douse those fires. The very survival of the United States depends on it.”
“You invited a friend to come from his home in Texas to tell him you’re going to hand him over to the Russians to be executed?”
Turnbull sighed. “A politician has no friends-only constituents, and you don’t even vote in the United States.”
Forte couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
Turnbull brightened. “There may be one other way.”
“Shoot.”
“Exactly. If you’re shot while resisting arrest so that we can send you to Russia for trial, surely the Russians will take that as an earnest of American good faith. Unless, of course, they insist on delivery of the body, in which case perhaps we can accommodate them there, too.”
21. ACCESSION AND ABSCISSION
28 JULY 2009
Only the President’s collar was clean, for only the President had not been outside that day.
Their shirt collars rimmed with black, their hair flecked with soot, their eyes bloodshot, the men had come to the White House conference room for an emergency meeting of the War Council: the president as chairman, the director of Central Intelligence, the director of National Security, the president’s national security adviser, the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leaders of the majority and minority of the Senate and House, the House speaker, and the vice-president. President Turnbull, comfortable with superstition, would have gladly eliminated one of the thirteen men, but none was really dispensable in this crisis.
“I have the unpleasant duty to report,” President Turnbull began, bringing the meeting to order, “that the Soviet Union has made no attempt to bring the lignite mine fires under control. If anything, they are getting worse.”
The Speaker of the House, as famed for his certitude as for his ignorance, said complacently, “No need for alarm, Mr. President. The crisis will be over in a couple of days. Those jet winds blow right around the earth, and they’ll blow the smoke right back in Ivan’s face. Then they’ll change their tune.”
“I wish I could be as sanguine,” replied the president. “But our meteorologists tell me that the combination of polar winds, moist air, and particulate matter coming together over the North Atlantic will cause most of the soot to precipitate out in rain, with very little coming to rest on the European continent.”
“Then they’ll burn themselves out.”
“True-but when? Coal fires in Illinois have been burning out of control for seventy years. Another well-known hydrocarbon fire, the so-called fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar of Shadrach, Meshak, and Abednego fame, has been burning steadily in Kirkuk, Iraq, since biblical times.” He smiled bleakly at the speaker, whose snow-white hair was now salt and pepper. “Are you suggesting we wait?”
The Speaker fell silent.
“The chair is open to constructive comment and suggestion.”
“Nuke ’em,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “-Or rather,” he added when he observed the shocked reaction around the table, “threaten them with a dose of ICBMs unless they shut down the fires.”
“Thus gaining immortality-if anyone is left to remember-for us as the men who started the Last World War? I think not.”
“Anyway,” added the secretary of state, a man with the face and backbone of a boiled turnip, “we must exhaust diplomatic initiatives before we even think of direct action. We must protest this gross violation of human rights in the strongest-”
“Write up your protest, Mr. Secretary, and I’ll sign it. Anybody else?”
The CIA chief, whose heavy-lidded eyes had been almost closed during this colloquy, woke up to ask: “Why don’t we talk about the one thing the Russians have indicated would bank their fires: handing over Ripley Forte.”
“What makes you think you can trust the Russians?” Turnbull said.
“We can’t, of course. But it’s the only course short of war that offers some hope.”
“You’d sell out an honorable and upstanding citizen, a wounded Marine veteran, a man who has fought the Russians and won, the son of a man who has fought the Russians and won, for the sake of ‘some hope’?”