“Sir! Sir! Mr. President!”
The President blinked awake, trying to adjust his eyes to the sudden glare of the overhead light. He had been dreaming so very nicely, too, a warm dream about—was it bread? Yes, bread. UFOs, it seems, were really loaves of bread, and the blinking lights were just the LEDs on the bread machines that made them… You could eat UFOs if you spread butter on them, that was the point.
“Sir? Are you awake?”
“Yes, Stan. What is it?”
There were a limited number of people who could wake the President. The names were on a list: the Secretary of State, the ambassador to the U.N., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whoever was on duty at NORAD…
A relatively small list. The President very much regretted that he had ever put his Press Secretary on it.
“Calm down, Stan. And tell me what it is. And if it’s the results of some kind of poll, I want you to march right out of here and—”
“It’s not that, sir! It’s General Frazetta! She’s gone berserk!”
The President sat up in bed and frowned at Stan. “Berserk? My little Jessica, berserk? What’s she done—” He smiled. “Gone and built another island?”
“She’s conducting a renegade military operation in Arkansas! She’s using Army Rangers and helicopters to attack some kind of church group!”
The President frowned. “Sounds serious.”
“The Attorney General tried to reach you earlier, but he’s not on the list to get you out of bed. He’s mad enough to spit. He called me—I was in my office in the Executive Wing—and he practically chewed my ear off. Civil rights violations, abuse of power, separation of Church and State—my God, what a fiasco. I came right over.”
The President considered Jessica Frazetta. Energetic, enthusiastic, overachieving. Sexy in a spunky, girl-next-door sort of way. And short. Really short.
He pictured her in a helicopter, spewing leaden death upon the citizens of Arkansas. He pictured her grinning as she did so. The thought of it made him smile.
“Any casualties?” he said.
“Several dead, both Army and civilian. My God, sir, how do we spin this?” The President lay back in his bed and pulled his covers up to his chin. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said.
“Sir?”
“We absolutely and categorically support General Frazetta’s actions.”
“Sir!” Stan was flabbergasted.
“Think about it, Stan. I appointed her to her present position. I was with her on her island, just a few days ago, shaking her hand and telling the world how wonderful she was. Implying that she’d saved the entire South from radiation poisoning. She’s in an absolutely critical position—she’s made herself damn near indispensable. I have to support her.”
“But—this fiasco—”
The President closed his eyes. “It’s not a fiasco yet. Right now it’s a brave and courageous action taken in defense of civilian lives.” The President smiled. “If it turns out to be a fiasco later, if she’s really bungled it, then we’ll say she misled us and cut her off at the knees.”
There was a moment of silence. “Yes, sir,” Stan said.
“Like I said, a no-brainer. Turn out the lights when you leave, Stan.”
“Yes, sir.”
The President heard Stan’s feet crossing the room, and then the lights went out and the door swung softly shut.
The President sighed and tucked the covers up to his ears. He tried to remember the dream he was having.
Bread, he remembered. It was about bread.
A pair of Hueys throbbed away into the rising sun, carrying Rails Bluff’s wounded. Including the Reverend Dr. Calhoun, who had been gut-shot two days ago, who had been in a coma for some time, but for whom—incredibly—no one in charge had ever thought to call a physician. Crazy, Jessica thought. The man would rather die than let anyone know about his little operation here. Fanatics. Jessica and her people were going to have to be very careful.
“Everyone gets patted down for weapons!” Jessica ordered. “When each is done, line them up on the road. Tell them rations and fresh water are coming!”
“O Lord!” cried a gangly red-headed man among the refugees. “O Lord, let me die with Brother Frankland! Let me pay for my sins!” The other refugees had cleared a space around him, looked at him with sidelong glances.
“O Lord! Take me now! I can’t be saved without Brother Frankland!”
“Who the hell is that?” Jessica asked. “Another preacher?” One of the grim-faced Ranger officers looked up. “He’s been like that ever since the shooting. He keeps saying he was a pornographer and that he should die.” He gave the man a grim look. “I think the others are good and sick of listening to him, but we can’t shut him up.”
Jessica rubbed her forehead over her injured eye. “Just make sure he doesn’t try to kill himself,” she said. The camp was going to be a colossal administrative night-mare. Sorting Frankland’s henchmen from the mere bystanders, and sorting the henchmen who had broken the law from those who hadn’t, and in the meantime feeding the hungry and doctoring the sick—the legal issues alone, she suspected, were enough to keep several grand juries busy for years.
Officers hopped to carry out her instructions. Jessica rubbed her forehead over her damaged left eye while she reached into a pocket to pull out her Iridium cellphone.
She dialed Pat.
“Yes?” he answered at once. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I came through it.”
“We were listening to the radio. Frankland had just started this new rant, but it went on for only a couple minutes, and then we lost the signal. So I figured that the Rangers showed up right then. How’d it go?”
“It went about…” She looked around at the stunned refugees, the burning radio station, bodies of the Rangers lying under blankets. “About as well as we could rationally have hoped,” she finished.
“That doesn’t sound too good,” Pat said.
“No,” Jessica said. “No, I wouldn’t call it good. It was the smallest and least destructive of a whole series of possible catastrophes, and that’s all the good you can say about it.”
“I’m glad you came through it okay.”
Jessica turned, pulled her rain cape over her head, hunched away from the nearest soldiers. “Pat,” she said, “I need you to make a phone call for me. I need you to call an ophthalmologist—probably one in Jackson—and make an emergency appointment. ASAP.”
“Okay.” Uncertainly.
“I need for you not to be overheard doing this.” She bit her lip. “Pat—the appointment’s for me.” Concern rasped Pat’s voice. “Was there a fight? Did you get hit?”