“Not bad for an old guy,” the backseater noted as he folded up his maps and other unnecessary but gravely important papers.
“Your vote of approval is noted.” / was never this stiff before, Jackson admitted to himself. He shifted himself in the seat. His butt felt like painful lead. How could all feeling be gone, yet there still be pain? he asked himself with a rueful smile. Too old, was how his mind answered the question. Then his leg made its presence known. Arthritis, damn it. He’d had to make it an order to get Sanchez to release the fighter to him. It was too far for a COD to take him from USS John C. Stennis back to Pearl, and the orders had been specific enough: Expedite return. On that basis he’d borrowed a Tom whose fire-control system was down, and therefore was non-mission-capable anyway. The Air Force had supplied the tankers. So after seven
10
hours of blessed silence, he’d flown half the Pacific in a fighter–doubtless for the last time. Jackson moved again as he turned the fighter toward the parking spot, and was rewarded with a back spasm.
“Is that CiNCPAC?” Jackson asked, spotting the white-clad figure by the blue Navy car.
Admiral David Seaton it was, and not standing erect, but leaning against the car and flipping through messages as Robby cut the engines and opened the canopy. A sailor rolled up a stepladder, the sort used by mechanics, to make Robby’s descent easier. Another enlisted man– woman, actually–extracted the arriving admiral’s bag from the storage compartment underneath. Somebody was in a hurry.
“Trouble,” Seaton said the moment Robby had both boots on the ground.
“I thought we won,” Jackson replied, stopping dead still on the hot concrete of the ramp. His brain was tired, too. It would be a few minutes before his thinking ran at the customary speed, though his instincts were telling him that something unusual was afoot.
“The President’s dead–and we got a new one.” Seaton handed over the clipboard. “Friend of yours. We’re back to DEFCON Three for the time being.”
“What the hell…” Admiral Jackson said, reading the first page of dispatches. Then he looked up. “Jack’s the new . ..?”
“Didn’t you know about him becoming VP?”
Jackson shook his head. “I was tied up with other things before I got off the boat this morning. Holy God,” Robby concluded with another shake of the head.
Seaton nodded. Ed Kealty resigned because of that sex scandal, the President persuaded Ryan to take the vice presidency until the elections next year, the Congress confirmed him, but before he could enter the chamber well, you can see what happened. Plane hit down center. “The JCSs are all gone. The deputies are stepping in. Mickey Moore”–Army General Michael Moore, the Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs–“has put in a call for all the CINCs to come into D.C., ASAP. We have a KC-10 waiting for us at Hickam.”
11
“Threat board?” Jackson asked. His permanent job, insofar as any uniformed posting was permanent, was Deputy J-3, the number-two planning officer for the Joint Chiefs.
Seaton shrugged. “Theoretically, it’s blank. The lO’s calmed down. The Japanese are out of the war business–”
Jackson finished the statement: “But America’s never been hit like this before.”
“The plane’s waiting. You can change aboard. Neatness doesn’t count at the moment, Robby.”
AS ALWAYS, TH E world was divided by time and space, especially time, she would have thought had she a moment to think, but she rarely did. She was over sixty, her small frame bowed down by years of selfless work, made all the worse because there were so few young ones to give her rest. That wasn’t fair, really. She’d spelled others in her time, and those of generations past had done the same in their time, but not now, not for her. She did her best to put that thought aside. It was unworthy of her, unworthy of her place in the world, and certainly unworthy of her promises, made to God more than forty years before. She now had doubts about those promises, but she’d admitted them to no one, not even her confessor. Her failure to discuss them was more troubling to her conscience even than the doubts were, though she vaguely knew that her priest would speak gently to her about her sin, if that’s what it was–was it? she wondered. Even if it were, yes, he’d speak gently about it. He always did, probably because he had such doubts himself, and both of them were of the age when one looks back and wonders what might have been, despite all the accomplishments of a productive and useful life.
Her sister, every bit as religious as she, had chosen the most common of the vocations and was now a grandmother, and Sister M. Jean Baptiste wondered what that was like. She’d made her choice a long time ago, in a youth she could still remember, and like all such decisions it had been made with poor reflection, however correct the
12
choice itself had been. It had seemed simple enough at the time. They were respected, the ladies in black. In her distant youth she could recall seeing the German occupation troops nod politely to their passing, for even though it was widely suspected that the nuns aided Allied airmen, and maybe even Jews trying to escape, it was also known that the nursing order treated everyone equally and fairly, because God required it. Besides even the Germans wanted their hospital when they were wounded, because you had a better chance there than anywhere else. It was a proud tradition, and even though Pride was a sin, it was one the dark ladies had committed after a fashion, telling themselves that perhaps God didn’t mind, because the tradition was in His Holy Name. And so when the time had been right, she’d made the decision, and that was that. Some had left, but the critical time for her to make such a choice had been difficult, what with the condition of the country after the war, and the need for her skills, and a world that had not yet changed enough for her to see her options for what they were. So she had thought about leaving, briefly, and put the idea aside, and stayed with her work.
Sister Jean Baptiste was a skilled and experienced nurse. She’d come to this place when it had still belonged to her parent country, and stayed after its status had changed. In that time she’d done her job the same way, with the same skill, despite the tornadic political changes that had gone on around her, no matter that her patients were African or European. But forty years, more than thirty of that in this same place, had taken their toll.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care anymore. Certainly it wasn’t that. It was just that she was almost sixty-five, and that was just too old to be a nurse with too few aides, often as not working fourteen-hour days, with a few hours for prayer tossed in, good for her soul but tiring for everything else. In younger years her body had been robust–not to say rugged–and healthy, and more than one of the physicians had called her Sister Rock, but the physicians had gone their way, and she had stayed and stayed and stayed, and even rocks can be worn down. And with fatigue came mistakes.
She knew what to be wary of. You could not be a
13
health-care professional in Africa and not be careful if you wanted to live. Christianity had been trying to establish itself here for centuries, but while it had made some inroads, it might never make others. One of those problems was sexual promiscuity, a local proclivity that had horrified her on her arrival nearly two generations earlier, but was now just… normal. But all too often lethally so. Fully a third of the patients in the hospital had what was known locally as “the thin disease” and elsewhere as AIDS. The precautions for that ailment were set in stone, and Sister Jean Baptiste had taught them in courses. The sad truth was that, as with the plagues of old, all that the medical professionals could really do with this modern curse was to protect themselves.
Fortunately with this patient, that was not a concern. The boy was only eight, too young to be sexually active. A handsome boy, well formed and bright, he’d been an honor student at the nearby Catholic school, and an acolyte. Perhaps he’d hear the call someday and become a priest–that was easier for the Africans than the Europeans, since the Church, in quiet deference to African customs, allowed priests down here to marry, a secret that was not widely known through the rest of the world. But the boy was ill. He’d come in only a few hours earlier, at midnight, driven in by his father, a fine man who was a senior official in the local government and had a car of his own. The doctor on call had diagnosed the boy with cerebral malaria, but the entry on the chart wasn’t confirmed by the usual laboratory test. Perhaps the blood sample had gotten lost. Violent headaches, vomiting, shaking of the limbs, disorientation, spiking fever. Cerebral malaria. She hoped that wasn’t going to break out again. It was treatable, but the problem was getting people to treatment.