“I did not fuck up!” Stephie heedlessly blurted out. “Is that what you think?”
“No, Stephie,” John insisted.
Stephie glared at Ackerman. From his clenched jaw, she saw, he would yield not an inch. Knots bulged from his cheeks as he contained his anger. “Everyone has a limit,” said a man who was clearly within sight of his. He turned to John Burns. “I’m giving Third Platoon to brigade HQ for local security.” He slammed the door and was gone in seconds. Dirt laid for traction on an icy road shot from his car’s six oversized, knobby tires.
“That’s not what he meant,” John assured Stephie in the silence that followed.
He tried to take her arm but she tore it from his grip and stormed off. She fled to hide not her anger but her reaction to it. Her eyes flooded with tears, and her mouth quivered and twitched. One shot at combat command was all she got.
Bill closed the thousand-page report. He had blocked out the entire afternoon to read it behind closed doors. The hastily assembled blue ribbon investigative committee had worked around the clock in the weeks since the murder of Elizabeth Sobo and the half dozen aides and Marine One crew members. They had left hundreds of loose ends dangling, but one conclusion had ample support.
The bomb had been meant for Bill.
He called his secretary. “Is Fielding still out there waiting?”
“He’s in the Situation Room, sir,” she replied.
“Get him up here.”
Bill reread the committee’s conclusion. They had not yet determined whether the assassins were foreign or domestic. The report, however, was exhaustive and thoroughly researched. Bill turned to one particularly irksome page. The committee had noted Clarissa’s nausea immediately after the bombing and attributed it to understandable shock. After all, she had been prepared to board the doomed flight, which ruled her out as a potential suspect. But a footnote reported that the FBI disagreed. Clarissa remained on Hamilton Asher’s list of suspects.
Richard Fielding entered the Oval Office.
Bill dropped the report on his desk with a thud. “That fucking asshole Asher is willing to frame Clarissa—and let the real murderers go free—just to take a cheap political shot at me!”
Bill telephoned the chief justice of the United States in Omaha, which was the emergency relocation site for most of the rest of the federal government. “It’s despicable!” Bill said as they waited.
The chief justice appeared on the video screen. “Good evening, Mr. President.”
“When will you be ready to hand down your decision about the National Secrecy Act?” Bill asked angrily and abruptly. The astonished chief justice replied that he couldn’t discuss matters before the Court. “I’m not arguing the goddamned case, but that Act is unconstitutional and you damn well know it! I need your decision, and I need it now! I’m fighting twowars: one against the Chinese and the other against Hamilton Asher. He’s subpoenaing, following, and probably bugging half my staff, who are working on highly classified war plans! How the hell do you keep a military secret when the FBI is bugging you? It’s outrageous, and our young men and women’s lives are at stake! Our nation’s survival is at stake! All of Asher’s activity — all of it — is being conducted under the authority of an Act that I’m confident you’ve already voted to rule unconstitutional! Now all I’m asking is that you get whatever clerk you’ve got drafting that opinion off his ass and get that ruling out! There’s a war on!”
“I can assure you, Mr. President, that we understand the urgency of the situation,” the chief justice calmly replied.
A calmer Baker thanked him and hung up. He had vented some of his anger, but the lid still rattled. “The instant that decision comes down,” he said to Fielding, “I’m telling Treasury to cut Asher’s budget by 80 percent, and I’m telling Defense to revoke the draft exemption for his agents. He’s got almost 12,000 able-bodied men and women prying though the trash cans of my staff. We could form a division out of his people.”
Fielding delicately cleared his throat. “Uhm, Mr. President,” he nonchalantly inquired, “who will perform domestic counterintelligence after you cut the FBI?”
Bill smiled at Fielding’s guileless attempt to restore his agency’s former stature and budget at the expense of Fielding’s old nemesis at the FBI.
“Oh, I dunno,” Bill replied. “Do you think the CIA is up to it?”
Fielding shrugged and said, “It’s against the law for the CIA to operate domestically.”
Baker stated, dictatorially, “Until we win this war, I am the fucking law.”
It felt to Hart as if his face were cut by blades of ice blown on the wind. Part snow, part frozen knife, the breeze sliced sideways across the crackling brush in which he lay.
He was at home.
Hart had spent only one week behind friendly lines. Most of it had been spent sleeping. Sleeping while waiting on a ride. Sleeping while waiting for new papers to be typed up. Sleeping on trucks, and planes, and helicopters. He had found it hard to break from the newfound body rhythm. He had had to shake himself awake as he crept through friendly lines and returned to occupied America.
But now, Hart had no such problems. He was wide awake. For beneath his vantage lay one hundred thousand Chinese soldiers. At least, that was what the infrared looked like as he panned the camera across the dark valley.
He was perched atop a microwave tower almost two hundred feet above the earth well inside the Chinese defensive perimeter. To the naked eye — in total darkness — there were only black treetops. But on the screen before him were a hundred thousand bright spots. A hundred thousand faint emitters of heat. Bright and fatter were the running engines or electric generators. Shining conduits — heating ducts — snaking from tent to glowing tent. But mainly there was an army of dim glow worms. Hart could see them clearly — snug and warm in their slumber — through the unshielded canvas of their shelters.
The microwave tower was an obvious choice for Hart’s remote recon. From the antennae and cabling nothing would have appeared amiss to the brave Chinese engineer who had scaled to the height from which Hart now clung. But inside the metal post — impervious to X-ray inspection — was the transmitter into which Hart’s camera was now plugged.
“Pan the camera left thirty degrees,” directed his mission briefer, who was controlling him from Washington fifty miles away. Hart swung the camera — and the picture on his and the briefer’s screens — thirty degrees to the left. He was a human pan-and-tilt camera mount in a gusting winter wind high above the frozen earth.
The cold was perfect for this mission, which had to be done at night. The digital infrared video camera saw only heat. During the day, the earth’s warm background glowed brightly and obscured all but hot engines or open fires. At night, the cold-soaked black canvas was filled with red dots, some moving, some still. He panned slowly on distant cue from one end of the valley to the other. The four-inch screen displayed stick figures everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere.
“That’s about it,” his briefer said over the microwave. The stereo sound was clear over the two small ear buds. “Is the security still good?”
Hart glanced down toward the trees, whose tops danced between his dangling feet. He was tethered to the antennae mounts and being blown with each solid gust. The pictures would have been useless but for the camera’s built-in stabilizer.