Charlie went straight to Mikoian’s crowded little office. He had to cool his heels outside, but only for fifteen minutes. The Assistant Secretary of Agriculture came out with a worried look on his well-bred face.
Charlie stuck his head in. “Come on, sit down,” Stas Mikoian told him. “Close the door behind you.”
“Thanks.” Charlie did. After he sank into his chair, he said, “I got a call from my sister-in-law in the middle of the night. They arrested Mike and took him away. I don’t like to beg, Stas, but I’m begging. If there’s anything you can do, please do it. I’ll pay you back some kind of way.” If that meant writing fawning stories about Joe Steele for as long as he stayed President, Charlie would do it, and count the cost later.
But Mikoian shook his head. “I’m sorry. There isn’t anything I can do.” He actually did sound sorry, where Kagan would have said the same thing with indifference and Scriabin might have gloated. Shaking his head again, he went on, “My hands are tied. The boss says he’s taken enough fleabites from your brother. He made his bed. Now he can lie in it.”
“Will he. . talk to me?” Charlie had to lick dry lips halfway through the question. He didn’t want to have to talk to Joe Steele, not about anything like this. But Mike was his brother. For flesh and blood, you did things you didn’t want to do.
“No,” the Armenian answered. “He knew you’d be coming around. He keeps track of everything, you know. He has for as long as I’ve worked for him, since right after the war. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. He told me to tell you this was once too often. And he told me to tell you that if he didn’t care for what you did it would have been once too often a long time ago now.”
“If I can guarantee that Mike will keep quiet-”
“You know you can’t. Keeping that kind of promise isn’t in him, any more than a drunk keeps promises to sober up. Your brother would fall off the wagon in a month, tops.”
No matter how much Charlie wanted to call him a goddamn liar, he couldn’t. Mikoian was too likely to be right. Voice dull with hopelessness, Charlie asked, “What am I supposed to tell Stella?”
“Tell her you did everything a brother could. You know I have a brother in California. There are wreckers among the engineers and scientists, too. I understand your trouble. Right now, it’s the country’s trouble. We’ll be better for it in the end.” Mikoian seemed to mean that, too. Charlie wondered how.
XII
The train wheezed to a stop. They were somewhere west of Livingston, Montana. Mike had seen the sign announcing the name of the town through the shutters the guards had put over the windows. He was convinced that wasn’t because they didn’t want the prisoners seeing out. No-it was because they didn’t want ordinary people looking in and seeing what they were doing with the men they’d arrested for wrecking.
He’d thought this car had been crowded when he stumbled into it under Penn Station. Well, it had been, and it got more and more so. You couldn’t go to another car to use the toilet. They had honey buckets in here. By now, the buckets were overflowing. Nobody’d bathed. There was barely enough water to drink, let alone to use for getting clean. The stink of unwashed bodies warred with that from the buckets.
There hadn’t been much food, either. They gave out stale chunks of bread and crackers and sheets of beef jerky hard enough to break a tooth on. All of it was like the free lunch at a saloon just inside hell’s city limits. It made everybody in the car thirstier-not that the guards cared.
Some men simply couldn’t take it. They gave up and died. The prisoners had passed the guards two bodies at different stops. From the way the air was starting to smell, somebody else had cashed in his chips, too, and was going off. If the guards wanted to let the prisoners know that nobody cared any more about what happened to them, well, they knew how to get what they wanted.
A guard banged on the locked and barred door at the front of the car. He kept banging on it till the cursing, moaning prisoners quieted down some. Then he shouted, “My buddy an’ me, we got Tommy guns with full drums. We got reinforcements, too. We’re gonna open this door. You fuckers come out slow, in good order. Slow, you hear? You all come chargin’ out at once, we’re gonna kill a whole bunch o’ you. Nobody’ll give a shit if we do, neither. So do like we tell you or get ventilated. Them’s your choices.”
He waited to let that sink in. Then, slowly and cautiously, he did open the door. As slowly and cautiously as they could, the wreckers came out: hungry, thirsty, whiskery, frightened men. Mike was angry as well as scared. He would have bet some of the other prisoners were, too. But the guards hadn’t been lying about their firepower. Charging Tommy guns with your bare hands was just a way to kill yourself, and maybe not quickly.
Sunlight made him blink and set his eyes watering. It had been gloomy in the car after they mounted those shutters. Montana. What did they call it? Big Sky Country, that was the name. It deserved the handle, too. The sweep of sky was wider and bluer than anything Mike had seen back East. The train stood on a siding in what could have been the exact middle of nowhere. A four-lane blacktop road paralleled the tracks. Not a car coming, not a car going.
“Line up in rows of ten!” a guard with a Tommy gun yelled. “Stand at attention if you know what that is. If you don’t, pick somebody who looks like he does and do like him.”
Mike took his place in one of those rows. All his other choices seemed worse. A drill sergeant would have cussed him out for his stand at attention-stab at attention would have been closer. But as long as the wreckers stood up straight and held still, the Jeebies didn’t fuss.
A breeze tugged at Mike’s uncombed, sweat-matted hair. It felt dry, and smelled of pine and grass. The mercury couldn’t have been over seventy-five. Along with everything else, he’d left New York City’s heat and humidity behind.
“Fuck!” somebody in back of him said softly. It sounded more like a prayer than an obscenity. The word dropped into a spreading pool of silence and disappeared. No traffic noise. No elevators going up and down in the building-no buildings, not as far as the eye could see. No radios blatting. No nothing.
More and more wreckers stumbled out of more and more train cars and formed more and more rows of ten. Along with the rest of them, Mike stood there, trying to stay on his pins while he waited to see what happened next.
He didn’t see it. He heard it. Some of the men at attention didn’t turn their heads to the left as soon as they caught the noise, for fear of what the guards would do. Others did, either taking the chance or not knowing better than to move without permission while at attention. When they got away with it, the rest, Mike among them, also looked.
A convoy of khaki-painted Army trucks was rumbling up the road toward them. Wherever they were going next, it was somewhere the railroad didn’t run. Mike wondered if there’d be any food and water at the end of the truck trip. All he could do was hope.
“Board the trucks till they’re full. I mean full!” a guard shouted after the big snorters stopped. “Don’t get cute. It’s the last dumb thing you’ll ever do. Somebody will be watching you at all times.”
Mike scrambled into the back of a truck. A canvas canopy spread over steel hoops kept out the sun and prying eyes. Pretty soon, the truck got rolling again. Out the back, he could see a little of where he’d been, but not where he was going.
“We oughta jump and run,” said the mousy little man shoehorned in next to him.
“Go ahead,” Mike answered. “You first.”
The mousy guy shook his head. “I don’t have the nerve. I wish I did. This is liable to be nothing beside whatever we’re going to.”