“Have you been to China before, John?”
“Nope. Taiwan once, long ago, to get screwed, blued, and tattooed.”
“No chance for that on this trip. We are both too old for this, you know.”
“I know,” Clark said, zipping himself up. “But you’re not going to sit back here, are you?”
“A Leader must be with his men, Ivan Timofeyevich.”
“That is true, Yuriy. Good luck.”
“They will not launch a nuclear attack on my country, or on yours,” Kirillin promised. “Not while I live.”
“You know, Yuriy, you might have been a good guy to have in 3rd SOG.”
“And what is that, John?”
“When we get back and have a few drinks, I will tell you.”
The troops suited up outside their designated helicopters. The U.S. Army chemical gear was bulky, but not grossly so. Like many American-issue items, it was an evolutionary development of a British idea, with charcoal inside the lining to absorb and neutralize toxic gas, and a hood that—
“We can’t use our radios with this,” Mike Pierce noted. “Screws up the antenna.”
“Try this,” Homer Johnston suggested, disconnecting the antenna and tucking it into the helmet cover.
“Good one, Homer,” Eddie Price said, watching what he did and trying it himself. The American-pattern Kevlar helmet fit nicely into the hoods, which they left off in any case as too uncomfortable until they really needed it. That done, they loaded into their helicopters, and the flight crews spooled up the General Electric turboshaft engines. The Blackhawks lifted off. The special-operations troops were set in what were—for military aircraft—comfortable seats, held in place with four-point safety belts. Clark took the jump seat, aft and between the two pilots, and tied into the intercom.
“Who, exactly, are you?” Boyle asked.
“Well, I have to kill you after I tell you, but I’m CIA. Before that, Navy.”
“SEAL?” Boyle asked.
“Budweiser badge and all. Couple years ago we set up this group, called RAINBOW, special operations, counter-terror, that sort of thing.”
“The amusement park job?”
“That’s us.”
“You had a -60 supporting you for that. Who’s the driver?”
“Dan Malloy. Goes by ‘BEAR’ when he’s driving. Know him?”
“Marine, right?” “Yep.” Clark nodded.
“Never met him, heard about him a little. I think he’s in D.C. now.”
“Yeah, when he left us he took over VMH-1.”
“Flies the President?”
“Correct.”
“Bummer,” Boyle observed.
“How long you been doing this?”
“Flying choppers? Oh, eighteen years. Four thousand hours. I was born in the Huey, and grew up into these. Qualified in the Apache, too.”
“What do you think of the mission?” John asked.
“Long” was the reply, and Clark hoped that was the only cause for concern. A sore ass you could recover from quickly enough.
“I wish there was another way to do this one, Robby,” Ryan said over lunch. It seemed utterly horrid to be sitting here in the White House Mess, eating a cheeseburger with his best friend, while others—including two people he knew well, Jack had learned—were heading into harm’s way. It was enough to kill his appetite as dead as the low-cholesterol beef in the bun. He set it down and sipped at his Coke.
“Well, there is—if you want to wait the two days it’s going to take Lockheed-Martin to assemble the bombs, then a day to fly them to Siberia, and another twelve hours to fly the mission. Maybe longer. The Black Jet only flies at night, remember?” the Vice President pointed out.
“You’re handling it better than I am.”
“Jack, I don’t like it any more than you do, okay? But after twenty years of flying off carriers, you learn to handle the stress of having friends in tight corners. If you don’t, might as well turn in your wings. Eat, man, you need your strength. How’s Andrea doing?”
That generated an ironic smile. “Puked her guts out this morning. Had her use my own crapper. It’s killing her, she was embarrassed as a guy caught naked in Times Square.”
“Well, she’s in a man’s job, and she doesn’t want to be seen as a wimp,” Robby explained. “Hard to be one of the boys when you don’t have a dick, but she tries real hard. I’ll give her that.”
“Cathy says it passes, but it isn’t passing fast enough for her.” He looked over to see Andrea standing in the doorway, always the watchful protector of her President.
“She’s a good troop,” Jackson agreed.
“How’s your dad doing?”
“Not too bad. Some TV ministry agency wants him and Gerry Patterson to do some more salt-and-pepper shows on Sunday mornings. He’s thinking about it. The money could dress up the church some.”
“They were impressive together.”
“Yeah, Gerry didn’t do bad for a white boy—and he’s actually a pretty good guy, Pap says. I’m not sure of this TV-ministry stuff, though. Too easy to go Hollywood and start playing to the audience instead of being a shepherd to your flock.”
“Your father’s a pretty impressive gent, Robby.”
Jackson looked up. “I’m glad you think so. He raised us pretty good, and it was pretty tough on him after Mom died. But he can be a real sundowner. Gets all pissy when he sees me drink a beer. But, what the hell, it’s his job to yell at people, I suppose.”
“Tell him that Jesus played bartender once. It was his first public miracle.”
“I’ve pointed that out, and then he says, if Jesus wants to do it, that’s okay for Jesus, boy, but you ain’t Jesus.” The Vice President had a good chuckle. “Eat, Jack.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“This food isn’t half bad,” Al Gregory said, two miles away in the wardroom of USS Gettysburg.
“Well, no women and no booze on a ship of war,” Captain Blandy pointed out. “Not this one yet, anyway. You have to have some diversion. So, how are the missiles?”
“The software is fully loaded, and I e-mailed the upgrade like you said. So all the other Aegis ships ought to have it.”
“Just heard this morning that the Aegis office in the Pentagon is having a bit of a conniption fit over this. They didn’t approve the software.”
“Tell ’em to take it up with Tony Bretano,” Gregory suggested.
“Explain to me again, what exactly did you upgrade?”
“The seeker software on the missile warhead. I cut down the lines of code so it can recycle more quickly. And I reprogrammed the nutation rate on the laser on the fusing system so that I can handle a higher rate of closure. It should obviate the problem the Patriots had with the Scuds back in ’91—I helped with that software fix, too, back then, but this one’s about half an order of magnitude faster.”
“Without a hardware fix?” the skipper asked.
“It would be better to increase the range of the laser, yes, but you can get away without it—at least it worked okay on the computer simulations.”
“Hope to hell we don’t need to prove it.’
“Oh, yeah, Captain. A nuke headed for a city is a bad thing.”
“Amen.”
There were five thousand of them now, with more coming, summoned by the cell phones that they all seemed to have. Some even had portable computers tied into cellular phones so that they could tap into the Internet site out here in the open. It was a clear night, with no rain to wreck a computer. The Leaders of the crowd—they now thought of it as a demonstration—huddled around them to see more, and then relayed it to their friends. The first big student uprising in Tiananmen Square had been fueled by faxes. This one had taken a leap forward in technology. Mainly they milled around, talking excitedly with one another, and summoning more help. The first such demonstration had failed, but they’d all been toddlers then and their memory of it was sketchy at best. They were all old and educated enough to know what needed changing, but not yet old and experienced enough to know that change in their society was impossible. And they didn’t know what a dangerous combination that could be.
The ground below was dark and unlit. Even their night-vision goggles didn’t help much, showing only rough terrain features, mainly the tops of hills and ridges. There were few lights below. There were some houses and other buildings, but at this time of night few people were awake, and all of the lights were turned off.
The only moving light sources they could see were the rotor tips of the helicopters, heated by air friction to the point that they would be painful to touch, and hot enough to glow in the infrared spectrum that the night goggles could detect. Mainly the troops were lulled into stuporous lassitude by the unchanging vibration of the aircraft, and the semi-dreaming state that came with it helped to pass the time.
That was not true of Clark, who sat in the jump seat, looking down at the satellite photos of the missile base at Xuanhua, studying by the illumination of the IR light on his goggles, looking for information he might have missed on first and twenty-first inspection. He was confident in his men. Chavez had turned into a fine tactical Leader, and the troops, experienced sergeants all, would do what they were told to the extent of their considerable abilities.