I could see why he was having as much trouble with all this as I was, although for different reasons. It was, after all, the nuclear exchange with the U.S.S.R. that had sparked the Cultural Revolution in China. What it had done to the Soviet Union was even worse. Moscow gone, Leningrad gone, basically the whole country decapitated.
I tried to remember Russian history. There'd been the czars. Then Lenin, who got assassinated or something. Then Trotsky, who got them into a series of border wars with places like Finland and Estonia, most of which he lost. Then Lavrenti's own grandfather for a while—with all kinds of internal famines and insurrections—who started the nuclear project, which got us into the atom-bomb race, which only ended when the Chinese zapped Moscow and the nuclear project, all at once. .
But in their time, it seemed, Trotsky never did take over the U.S.S.R., though Lavrenti's grandfather did. There wasn't a series of border wars. There was one big one. They called it World War II, and it was with a man named Hitler, a German, out to conquer the world, and very nearly making it before the rest of the world united against him.
That was a stunner. Germany was just one country! I'd played there! It wasn't anywhere nearly big enough to threaten the whole world!
And besides—there was Lavrenti, sitting across the room from me, slowly igniting his Cuban Claro. Of course, he was nominally a Communist. But the Russians were nowhere near as militant as, say, the English Bolsheviks, with their centers of aggression in all their so-called commonwealth federated republics. Thank heaven Canada and Australia had split off. . . . I shook my head. It didn't make much sense to me.
It did, unfortunately, to Lavrenti Djugashvili. He had smoked the first half-inch of his cigar by the time Kennedy finished with the CIA report, and expected it when the senator stopped and looked inquiringly directly at him. "I take your point," said Lavi. "This is a matter of concern. If this invasion of your country is in the final analysis directed at mine-"
"Not at yours exactly, I think," Jack said quickly. "At the Soviet Union that exists in their time, I would suppose."
"Whose people," Lavi said heavily, "are still my own, are they not?"
Kennedy didn't say anything. He only gave a fraction of a nod.
Lavi stood up. "With your permission, dear Mrs. Kennedy," he said somberly, "I think I must visit my embassy now. I thank you for this information, Senator. Perhaps something should be done, although I do not now see just what."
We all stood up, even us women. It wasn't a mark of respect so much as a sort of declaration of sympathy. When he was gone, Senator Kennedy rang for the butler to serve us nightcaps. "Poor Lavrenti," he said. And then, "Poor us, too, for that matter, because I don't see just what to do, either."
Bad back or not, the senator decided to drive me back to my hotel himself. Jackie came along for the ride. It wasn't a pleasure jaunt. The rain was coming in sheets and the streets were slippery with emulsified oil. -
All three of us fit easily in the big front seat. We didn't talk much, not even Jackie, who was helping her husband scan the road nervously—since both his younger brothers had died in car accidents, one drowned, one burned, she was uneasy about cars. I had my own thoughts. It was not much past ten o'clock. Nine in Chicago. Ferdie would surely still be awake. Should I call him? Did I have the right to, for Dom's sake? Did I have the right not to, for Ferdie's sake?
So I hardly noticed when we slowed down with an unexpected traffic jam ahead of us, until the senator leaned forward irritably. "What the hell?" he muttered, trying to peer past the cars stalled right in front of us.
"What is it?" asked Jackie. "An accident?"
It was no accident.
Kennedy swore. Through the windows of the car ahead I saw something coming toward us in the other lane. It was fast and big, but it didn't have the flashing lights of a police car or ambulance. It had no proper lights at all, just a single bright spotlight that flick-flick'd back and forth across the road, like the blade of a windshield wiper, and the light illuminated something that stuck out of the vehicle itself.
It looked almost like a cannon.
"My Jesus God Almatty," said the senator, "it's a fucking tank."
Jackie cried out—so did I, I'm sure. The senator didn't wait. He backed the big Chrysler around in a quarter-circle high-speed turn, banging the muffler against the curb on the far side of the street, cramped the wheel as far as it would go, and floored it. He skidded out onto the highway maybe thirty yards ahead of the tank, accelerating all the way up to ninety miles an hour on that meandering river road, and I kept seeing that huge cannon sticking out in front of the tank. Aiming now straight at us. The senator felt it, too, because at the first cross street he stood on the brake. We fishtailed to a stop— almost a stop; oh, say, about forty miles an hour—and he manhandled that car around the corner.
A taxi was coming the other way.
I have never felt closer to death. We stopped. So did the other car, but not with anything to spare. Our front bumper was almost touching the taxi driver's door, and the man inside was already rolling his window down to sob and scream at jack.
Who paid him no attention.
We had stalled the engine. jack didn't even try to start it again. He opened his door and leaned out, grunting at the twisting he was giving his back, to stare as the tank went past, fast and serious, followed by half a dozen troop-carrying trucks. I could see the gleam of helmets in the street lights as they passed, and behind them was another tank.
"Remarkable," said Jack Kennedy.
"Why are we putting tanks like that on the Street?" I demanded. He turned to look at me. jack is an elderly man, but I had never seen him look quite that old before. He put one arm around Jackie protectively.
"We ain't," he said. "Those are not ours. We don't have any tanks that look like that."
The veterinarian was twenty-four years old and she was terrified. She soaped herself and rinsed herself six times, as ordered, and came out naked and wet to the farm bedroom where the army captain was waiting. She did not even think about being naked in front of him as he passed the counter wand slowly over every inch of her skin, listening to the sporadic rattle of radiation. "I think you got all the dust," the officer said at last. "You say you found the cattle just like this? And that dust all over everything?" She nodded, eyes big and frightened "You can get dressed, "he finished "I think you're all right. "But he watched her go with fears of his own. Radioactive fallout! Somehow half a square mile had been coated with high-level radionuclides—here, no more than forty miles from Dallas, with no war going on that he knew about and no source of the fallout reported anywhere. It was a puzzle with no answer. And it was a fear that shook him to his bones—what if it had happened forty miles away, in the heart of the city itself?
26 August 1983
6:40 A.M. Nicky DeSota
I was dreaming that Mrs. Laurence Rockefeller had asked me to arrange the mortgage for a six-hundred-million-dollar apartment complex along the lake, only she wanted to start with a down payment of one hundred fifty dollars because all her money was tied up in dimes . . . and then when I finally got the papers ready to sign she couldn't do it because she didn't have any thumbs. And then, as the bumping of the plane landing woke me up, the first thing on my mind wasn't where I was, or what was going to happen to me, but whether Mr. Blakesell had known I was arrested in time to get someone to cover my three mortgage closings. There wasn't anything I could do about it, of course.