“We can’t not arrest them,” the general said, and Jake Grafton glumly nodded his concurrence. In some complex, convoluted way, this whole mess was about illegal drugs and the people who sold and bought them. The soldiers were going to have to address the problem of the sellers and the users whether they or their superiors wanted to or not.
Captain Jake Grafton, naval officer, instinctively recoiled from the implications of the solution. Here was a law-enforcement function pure and simple, yet as the representatives of the government on the spot, the soldiers had to do something. But what? A problem needing a surgeon’s scalpel was going to be addressed with the proverbial blunt instrument, the U.S. Army.
Jake Grafton reached for the phone.
Amazingly enough, no one on the Joint Staff had considered this possible complication. Career officers to a man, they had approached the problem from a purely military standpoint. The time crunch had demanded that logistics and the command, control, and communications functions — C3—be addressed first. That was about as far as anyone had gotten. Yet the problem was reality now.
He got home that night at three a.m. Callie was waiting for him when he came through the door.
“Amy asleep?”
“For hours.”
“Got any coffee?”
She nodded and led the way to the kitchen. When both of them had a cup in front of them and were seated at the kitchen table, she asked, “How is it going?”
He rubbed his face. “We’re locking up everyone who resists military authority and everyone in possession of drugs. Holding them down at the armory. The jails are full.”
“You’re exhausted, Jake.”
“Without a doubt, this is one of the worst days of my life. God, what a mess! We’re all in over our heads — General Land, General Greer, me, every soldier on the street.”
“Did you have any dinner?”
“Wasn’t hungry.”
She headed for the refrigerator.
“Please, Callie, I don’t want anything. I’m too tired. I’m going to take a shower and fall into the rack.”
“We saw you and Toad on television. Outside L’Enfant Plaza.”
“An atrocity, like something the Nazis did to the Jews. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Evil. You could feel it. Wanton murder on a grand scale.”
She came over and put her arms around his shoulders. “What kind of people would do that to other people?” she murmured.
Jake Grafton just shook his head and drank the last of his coffee.
The next morning he stopped by the armory before he went to the FBI building. The rain had slackened and become a mist, under a low ceiling. The streets and wide boulevards looked obscenely empty. Jake passed an occasional military vehicle, some government cars, and the usual police, but nothing else.
All the stoplights were working. He stopped at one, but his was the only car in all four directions. He looked, then went on through.
He was stopped at a roadblock on Constitution Avenue. A soldier standing forward of the door on the passenger’s side of the car held an M-16 on him while a sergeant checked his ID card.
The sergeant saluted. “You can go on now, sir.”
“Let me give you a word of advice, Sergeant. The people we’re after will start shooting at the drop of a hat. I suggest you get a couple more riflemen to cover each car as you approach it. And you might park a couple of your trucks sideways in the street here so they can’t go barreling through without stopping.”
“Yessir. I’ll talk to my lieutenant.”
Ninety-one people were now being detained at the armory. They were being held in unused offices and in the corridors and along the sides of the giant squad bay. The soldiers had been busy. They had obtained chain and padlocks from a hardware store somewhere and were securing belligerent people to radiators and exposed pipes and anything else they could find that looked solid.
Some of the new arrivals cursed and screamed and shouted dire threats, but the ones who had been there a while tried to sleep or sobbed silently. Some of them lay in their own vomit. “Withdrawal,” one officer told Jake as he walked by trying not to breathe the fetid stench. The soldiers had a couple of military doctors and corpsmen attending these people. Pairs of soldiers took prisoners to the heads one at a time.
Forty or fifty of the prisoners appeared to be just people who had ignored the order to keep their vehicles off the street. These people were sober and well dressed and were busy complaining loudly to an officer who was interviewing them one by one, checking addresses and driver’s licenses and writing all the information down, then turning them loose to walk home. The cars stayed in the armory lot.
Jake paused and listened to one of the interviews. The man was doing his best to browbeat the officer, a major. Jake signaled to the major, who left his interviewee in midtirade and stepped into the hall. “What are you doing with jerks like that?”
“Holding the worst ones,” the major said, smiling. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “That one isn’t too bad. He just can’t get it through my head that the military order didn’t apply to him.”
After a hurried conference with General Greer and a look at the map of the city, Jake drove off to FBI headquarters. He picked up Toad Tarkington en route.
Toad sat silently beside Jake and stared at the empty streets and rare pedestrians.
The federal guard at the kiosk at the main entrance of the FBI building telephoned upstairs. Two minutes later a junior agent arrived to take them upstairs. “Not many people made it to work today,” the agent told them and gestured toward the empty offices. “We have cars going around picking up people, but we’ll only bring in about half of them.”
Hooper was expecting them. He took them into his office and poured coffee from a coffee maker on his credenza. His clothes were rumpled and he needed a shave.
“What’s your job, exactly?” he asked Jake.
“The general sort of added me to his staff temporarily. I’m really on the Joint Staff, along with Lieutenant Tarkington here and sixteen hundred other people.”
Hooper had no reply. If the military bureaucracy were half as complicated as the FBI’s, further questions would be futile. He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got about a half hour. Then I have to give a presentation to the presidential commission, or the Longstreet Commission, which is what I understand they’re calling themselves now that Chief Justice Longstreet is one of the victims.”
Without further ado he began: “As you may know, the President’s helicopter was shot down with a couple of Stinger missiles. American manufacture. We’re inventorying the Stinger missiles in every ammo depot nationwide and looking at every theft report we have, but we haven’t got anything solid yet. We’ve talked to everybody in a ten-mile radius of the little park on the river that the missiles were fired from, but so far nothing.
“Our best leads are the rifles that were left after the attorney general and the Chief Justice were shot. The rifles are identical, Winchester Model 70s, bolt action in thirty-ought-six caliber. We’ve tried to trace them both and we’ve gotten lucky. Ten years ago the rifle that fired the shot that hit the AG was sold by a gun store to a dentist in Pittsburgh. He sold it six weeks ago via a newspaper ad. A man called him about the ad, then showed up an hour later, looked the rifle over, and paid cash. No haggling and no name.
“But we got lucky again. Sometimes it goes like that and sometimes you can’t buy a break. The dentist described the man and he had a distinctive tattoo on his forearm. That came up a hit on the national crime computer. Guy name of Melvin Doyle, who as luck would have it was arrested three days ago in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, for beating hell out of his ol’ lady. Doyle’s done time for grand larceny, forgery, and a variety of misdemeanors.”