Tears coursed down the King’s face cutting into the dust caked on it as he turned to the west and followed his army. It was a while before he sped up the pace to catch up with the column.
CHAPTER 11
Dane was slammed back in the seat as the SR-71 accelerated down the runway and leapt into the air. The nose of the jet was pointed almost vertical as they gained altitude. Dane pulled out an e-Book that he had borrowed from one of the crewmembers on the FLIP. He’d downloaded all of Frost’s books of poetry into it. He accessed the first book and clicked through to the preface, which had a brief summary of Frost’s life.
As the SR-71 leveled off at 60,000 feet, Dane quickly read the bio to get a feeling for the man he had seen in his vision. Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and was named after General Robert E. Lee. His father was the editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post. Dane paused as he read the next entry in the bio: when he was nine, Frost told his mother he heard voices when he was alone and that he shared her gift for ‘second hearing and sight’. So history agreed with the vision he’d had to a certain extent, Dane thought.
His first poem was published in 1894 and he was desperately in love with a woman named Elinor White. Frost took the first two bound copies of his collection of poems and went to her, begging her to marry him. She declined and he burned his copy of the collection and returned home dejected. He then decided to leave Massachusetts and travel to the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. Dane found that strange — why was the poet drawn to that location?
After some time in the swamp, Frost finally returned home and White agreed to marry him. But from that point, it appeared from what Dane was reading, that the poet’s life entered an even darker phase. He had a son who died of cholera and then his mother was diagnosed with cancer and died later the same year. Several years later he had a daughter who died three days after her birth. Throughout these tragedies Frost made his living teaching, but he also continued to write poetry.
His sister was sent to a mental institution for the rest of her life — Dane wondered if she too heard the voices and couldn’t handle it. In 1938 Frost’s wife died and he suffered an emotional collapse. What Dane found interesting was that almost all of Frost’s children suffered various ailments, with several deaths and at least one suicide and numerous commitments to mental hospitals.
Dane was surprised to see that Frost visited the White House in 1958 and met with President Eisenhower. He wondered what that meeting was about. Dane’s eyes widened slightly as he read about Frost in 1959 predicting Kennedy’s election in 1960. And then in 1962 Frost did indeed travel to Russia. He was sick during the trip, but Khrushchev went to where the poet was laid up and visited him and the two talked for ninety minutes.
Upon arriving back in the United States, Frost caused a minor furor when he said that Khrushchev had told him that Americans were too liberal to fight. And, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, admitted that Khrushchev had not said that. The poet died three months later.
Dane paused as he got to the end of the short biography. It validated several things from his vision and he was certain he had never read or heard these things about Robert Frost before, so it wasn’t coming from some old memory.
He began reading the poems, searching. He paused as he read the last lines on one stanza from “Storm Fear,” where Frost doubted humans had the heart to save themselves.
Dane felt the connection of his own fear to those lines; he also wondered if it was a reference to the Ones Before who seemed to be very chancy with their aid. He hit the forward button and stopped at the next poem, In Equal Sacrifice,’ which appeared to be about Robert of Bruce, and the sacrifices he made, but seemed relevant to recent events Dane had experienced.
Dane scanned down, searching for the words that rang of the voice to him, skipping several stanzas until he got near the bottom where Frost wrote about giving all to the hopeless fight.
The lines echoed in Dane’s mind. Was that his task? To give all to the hopeless fight? And if so, why?
The next poems were from North of Boston, and immediately he noticed a reference to seeing a figure in darkness with a face “as plain as white plate.” Had frost seen a Valkyrie? It was a very unusual way, even for a poet, to describe a face, but a perfect way to describe a Valkyrie.
Dane clicked on and came to Frost’s most famous poem about two roads diverging in the woods. But he read it now with a different sense of what the poet might have been saying, sensing something deeper under the words. He remembered the feeling he’d had about his vision, that he had seen something that had really happened. What if what he saw was another road, one that hadn’t been taken in Dane’s own life, but maybe it had been taken in some other way? Dane felt as if he were very close to understanding something fundamental about the gates and the Shadow.
The next poem was the one Frost had recited to Kennedy. “Fire and Ice.” Dane continued on. The title of a poem caught his eye: “The Trial by Existence.” Dane found he was nodding, the rhythm of the words almost a mantra in his mind. When he had started reading the poems he had wished that Frost had simply said what the voices told him, but Dan was realizing that perhaps Frost had had visions just like he did and been forced to use the written word, the only means he had, to try to get those visions out of his head. Reading the lines, Dane knew he was picking up more than he was consciously realizing.
One poem even focused on quartz, which Dan found strange. Quartz? Dane saw the crystal skulls in his mind and remembered watching Sin Fen’s head transform into one. He could feel his body pressed against the shoulder harness as the SR-71 banked and began descending. Quickly, he punched the button, turning the page. A long poem, THE GENERATIONS OF MEN, lit up the screen. Dane began scanning it, searching it for lines that triggered a reaction and he found them. It mentioned oracles, voices, visions.
Dane could see the aircraft carrier directly ahead. The Sr-71 vibrated as the pilot decelerated, slowing the supersonic craft to just above its stall speed. At the end of the poem it mentioned meeting elsewhere.
Dane looked up as the nose of the SR-71 lifted up as the pilot tried to eke every square inch of drag out of the delta shaped wings. With a heavy thump the plane hit the deck of the carrier, it raced down the deck and then was snagged by red nylon webbing stretched across its path. Dane was just about to tuck the e-book away in his pack when he noted a footnote the editor of the last collection had made, listing a quote Frost made during an interview:
“One thing I care about, and wish young people could care about, is taking poetry as the first form of understanding. If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.”
The calculations were rudimentary. The two Russians on board Mir simply had to figure in their altitude above the target, terminal velocity once the MIRV rockets entered the atmosphere, cross-checked by the rotation of the Earth and the speed of the space station.
They programmed the data into the computer and waited while the result was tabulated. It didn’t take long; about four seconds. A small flashing X appeared on the projected flight path of the space station and a digital countdown, currently at three minutes, thirty seconds also lit up. The senior cosmonaut sat in the command seat, his finger over the launch button. The fact that what he was about to do was an act of war with Peru concerned him little. What had happened at Chernobyl was also an act of war and on a scale that it threatened the capital of his country. What was happening at Nazca was a threat to the entire world, Peru included.