The pilot rolled over onto the rock plateau, came to a halt on his back, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh. Lieberman felt Mo's body come close to him, put an arm around her, felt Annie too, held them both, not knowing who was sobbing, who was laughing right then (and still something nagging away inside). When something like sanity returned, he opened his eyes and saw Davis watching them.
'You're bleeding,' the pilot said. 'Cut on the forehead. Stitches, if you ask me. Any other problems?'
'No.'
'And you two?' Mo and Annie looked just fine.
'Good. Well, Professor, it seems you came off worse. Now shall we see if we can get that little toy of yours working before we burn to a crisp?'
'You bet.' Lieberman retrieved the videophone from where he'd left it. He turned the thing on and they stared at coloured snow.
'I guess it's time to walk,' Bob Davis said, and started out for the goat track that led down the dry, rocky escarpment.
CHAPTER 34
Something Visible
'They could still win this war,' Tim Clarke said quietly on the portable videophone parked on the dressing table in Helen Wagner's bedroom. 'You both ought to understand that.'
He was on his own again, talking to Helen and Schulz, circumventing normal channels as usual. Clarke hadn't melded with his advisers yet. There was something between them, she thought, something that might even amount to mistrust. In his own head, she thought, he had calculated the time scale of events and decided there was no room here for niceties. Either he led directly, from the front, or the response descended into committees and meetings. It was a high-risk strategy, but she could understand why Clarke was following it. He was still a stranger in the Oval Office.
"There's someone inside, sir,' she answered, pushing some spare clothes into a bag. 'They're second-guessing what we're doing. They seem to know so much. And don't forget about Belinda Churton, my predecessor. Someone killed her, and she'd be doing a much better job here than me.'
'Maybe, but I'm not sure we want to be diverted by that right now. And by the way, you're doing just fine. I'd tell you if I thought otherwise. You got your team right for this little trip of yours?'
'I think so. Barnside handles the practical side. I got Larry Wolfit, my number two, with some of his computer team too. If we get their installation intact, we can get it back on our side, don't doubt it.'
'I wouldn't dream of it. You and Barnside going to manage to get along out there?'
Clarke was quick to spot these things, she thought. 'The protective older figure act gets a little wearing sometimes, to be frank.'
'Yeah. I guess he can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. But then, so can you.'
'We'll cope.' She threw some things into the bag as they talked, trying to picture Barnside in the field. Maybe he got a new kind of fluency, of naturalness out there, found his true environment, like a seal rolling clumsily off the land into the ocean and finding how easy it was to swim.
'You do that,' Clarke said. 'We've got the world on a knife edge. There's no room for personal stuff. Yesterday all we got was phone calls asking when we were going to bury Bill Rollinson. Now the phone doesn't ring so much any more. People are retreating behind their own borders, back into their shells, wondering what the hell is going to fall from the sky next. Nothing works. Not the markets, not half the telecommunications north of the equator. I got the UN on my back like it's my fault, and half of that is because the phone lines between New York and Washington still work and we're the only people they can call. And if these Gaia people are right, things are going to get a whole lot worse tomorrow, in ways no one seems sure of. Isn't there anything else we can do on the ground now that the Spanish base is down?'
Schulz said, 'The Shuttle's our best hope, sir. Failing that, we're going to have to find them and take over their unit. That's the only other option.'
'There's nothing you can do to resuscitate La Finca or Kyoto, Irwin?' Helen asked.
Schulz shook his head. 'Not in time. Kyoto's still full of that VX crap and it's going to be a couple of days before we Can put people in there safely, a week or more before we can rely on what we have here.'
'What's the timing on the storm?' Clarke asked.
'Not good,' Helen said. 'As far as we can tell. Lieberman is still missing. We don't know whether he got out or not.'
'There's people been seen in the mountains,' Schulz said. 'But we haven't made contact yet. It's a big, wild area out there.'
Clarke grimaced. Behind his dark, thoughtful face they could see the bright midday light in Washington, the corner of what looked like the seal of office. All these icons, Helen thought, and their power on the wane.
'Where are we now?' the President asked.
'You just have to take a look out the window, sir,' Schulz said. 'This thing is clearly visible with the naked eye if you use a filter. And our guess is the peak is going to be big. Huge. Whatever effects we've seen so far, whether Charley caused them or not, they're nothing compared to what we might get from now on, with or without Sundog. We face massive disruption of telecom, power grids, maybe some geological activity too. Add in what Charley has under her belt and I think you could see localized peaks of radiation, maybe up to the strength of serious physical human damage. At this kind of level, it's hard to predict exactly what Sundog will spit out. We never envisaged its use in these circumstances, but she's got a lot of different levers she can throw — microwave, electromagnetic emissions, particle beam.'
'When does it peak, Irwin?' Helen asked.
'Too erratic to be exact, even if I was confident we had the right people to guess that one. Sometime between 1200 and 1250 UTC tomorrow, that's my best guess.'
Clarke swore softly, then said, 'So what you're saying is that we've got a little over nineteen hours to get this thing back? Or she can do what the hell she likes?'
'No, sir,' Schulz said, genuinely puzzled this point hadn't got home to them yet. 'What I'm saying is what Lieberman said, and no one seems to be listening. You have an emergency on your hands whatever happens. It just gets a whole lot worse if we leave Charley holding that magnifying glass in her hands.'
And with that, Schulz made an excuse and was gone. The line to La Finca went dead.
Clarke sighed. 'He's a smart guy, Helen. If he's right and we have a big problem either way, maybe you should be staying here.'
'No, Mr President,' she said, glancing at her watch. It was a twenty-minute drive from her house in Rosslyn to the national airport where the Agency Gulfstream would be waiting. There was another twenty minutes to spare. Time was ticking beneath their feet, and she didn't like the look on Clarke's face. It had a touch of the confessional about it. 'We have plenty of people capable of handling a natural disaster. What we need to make sure of is that we don't have an unnatural one that's much worse on our hands.'
'I guess so.'
She stole him a glance that said shoo. You weren't supposed to treat the President like that; but then, the President wasn't supposed to call you in your bedroom while you were packing. 'Excuse me a moment.' She yelled out into the hall, 'Martha? Will you feed the cat while I'm gone?'
'Sure thing, Helen,' said a middle-aged voice from the hall. 'It'll be a pleasure.'
Helen smiled at the videophone. 'The world champion cleaner. I'm a lucky sort of person.'
'Good. You're going to need it. Even after all I said, there's one hell of a goddamn range war brewing over this thing. If this goes wrong, a lot of people go down with it. Me included.'
She moved out of the range of the video camera for a moment so that he couldn't see the concern on her face. 'I didn't hear that, sir.'