TWENTY-SEVEN
Mark heard a car and hurried to the living room window to look out into the frosty dusk. Rafe's. He drove up faster than usual, hit brakes and light switch, and skidded to a stop. The door popped open, Rafe jumped out, it slammed, and he started for the house at a trot.
"Is it Rafe, Mark?" Tris called from the kitchen.
Shit man! Mark felt a thrill run through him. Rafe's contact must have the stuff!
Rafe took the porch steps at a bound and burst in, grinning hugely. "He's got it!" he shouted. "He called me and he's got it! The suitcase from Allah! We can pick it up tomorrow, or tonight if we want!"
He closed the door behind him then. Phil and Tris came in from the kitchen, Mary a step behind, all talking excitedly. "The suitcase from Allah!" said Tris, and turned to her husband. "See! I said it was an Arab."
"That's a figure of speech," Mark said. "I'll bet it's not an Arab. The Arabs like revenge too much not to carry it out themselves. It's probably KGB."
Raphael Dietrich laughed. "I'll never tell." He sobered then, just a little. "We've got to decide some things now. You want to eat first or what?"
"Talk, Rafe," Mary said. "I'm too excited to eat."
"Yeah!" Phil and Tris said the word together.
An unexpected chill ran through Mark: this was it. Tomorrow—the day after at the latest—they'd be dropping the world's third atom bomb. "I'll go with that," he said. "Talk first, eat later."
They took seats, Tris and Phil leaning forward on the old sofa, Mary and Mark in overstuffeds, Rafe sitting backward on a wooden chair. "Okay," Rafe said. "It's a long drive. If you want to drop it tomorrow, we need to go get it tonight. I know where the place is, so Mark and I can go together in the pickup and trade driving. The two of us will load the thing. If we leave right after supper, we can be back by one or two in the morning.
"Or we can drive there tomorrow; whichever you want. You're the ones been so anxious."
He looked at Mark. Mark felt like he had to take a crap. "Let's do it tonight," Mark said. And get it over with. They turned to Phil and Tris. Phil's face was suddenly very sober; Tris was looking at him questioningly.
"Shit!" Phil said. "Tonight, I guess. I tell you what; just now I got the wim-wams."
Rafe laughed again. "You and me both, Phil baby, you and me both. They'll go away though when we see that nice mushroom cloud, and know that the boom is the death knell of nuclear power in the United States. If not the whole world."
"Yeah!" Phil said. The word carried no enthusiasm.
"So we'll bring the stuff here. Then Mark and me can get a few hours sleep before we take you guys and go load it in the plane. We ought to load it about the time it's first getting light out. There probably won't be anyone around the field that time of day to wonder what we're loading."
No one said anything for a moment. "Is that it then?" Mary asked, looking around. "Let's go eat before the food gets cold."
***
At Belgrade, the president's small travel staff remained at the American embassy, as usual, while the president, with the ambassador, carried out their official functions. And as usual, several messages arrived for the president. Zale looked them over. One, from Milstead, described briefly the initial congressional and press reaction to his technical breakthrough statement in the Warsaw speech.
Zale didn't give it to him. There was little the president could do about it from there, and it could be a distraction. He'd give it to him when they left Ankara, ready to start home.
***
The modified old four-place Cessna was flying at 3,000 feet above the west shore of Chesapeake Bay, heading south at 110 mph. The back door was gone. Freezing air snarled through the empty doorway—their bomb bay—but the numbness Tris felt had nothing to do with cold. It had everything to do with the object on the rack beside her.
She'd been visualizing a suitcase bomb, and they'd received it in something much like a metal suitcase. But inside had been a 203mm nuclear artillery shell, rigged with a cargo chute. And an artillery shell looked so overtly, blatantly deadly! In this instance it was twenty kilotons worth of deadly.
She'd almost died after Rafe and Mark had gotten it on the plane. Rafe had taken a short-handled sledge hammer from the pickup and slammed the base of the shell with it as hard as he could!
He'd grinned when she'd screamed. "I was just activating the rear fuse," he'd said over the engine noise, then leaned over Phil's shoulder. "That made the computer inside think it's been fired out of a cannon. The front fuse will activate automatically in twenty minutes. It can't go off till then. Drop it from 3,000 feet, like we talked about. It'll take an impact to explode it, but it can't go off before twenty minutes. It'll take you about fifteen minutes to arrive over target. Then Tris pushes the dump lever and out it goes. Right? You'll have five minutes then to get the hell out. Five minutes is about nine, ten miles, plenty far enough that the shock wave won't wreck you."
Then he and Mark had gotten out, and stood watching as the plane took off.
Phil's voice took her attention off the deadly cylinder beside her. "We're coming up on it," he said. She could see the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant about two miles ahead, sitting in a break in the cliffs. "Be ready. When I raise my right hand, you grab the dump handle. When I chop it downward, dump her."
She said nothing, only nodded. The gesture was lost on him; his eyes were on the plant, as hers were. In a few minutes, five or six, the plant would be ruined—in her imagination a seared and glassy circle.
It was an endless ninety seconds. Phil's right hand lifted, and she clutched the dump lever with hands water-weak. His head was almost pressed against the side window as they drew over the plant, but she didn't notice; her gaze was fixed on his hand. Chop!
Tris pushed the lever, harder than necessary, and the heavy shell, with its cargo-chute pack, slid down the now-tilted rack and out into the icy propellor blast. As she pulled in the static line, she heard the engine roar increase, felt the speed surge. Her guts, which had been tense before, had knotted when she'd released the bomb.
Moving forward, she took the seat beside Phil, pulling off her mittens, unzipping her mountain parka at the throat, and belting herself in. The plant was directly behind, and she couldn't watch the parachute.
Another minute passed, and another; it should be hitting the ground about now, she thought, but nothing had happened. She wondered how much time they had left on their twenty minutes, whether anyone had seen it come down, and if they had, what they were doing.
Phil had been losing altitude, as planned, to gain additional speed and hopefully get below radar pickup height. They were only a hundred feet or so above the bay, with the brow of cliffs cutting off sight of the plant, when the bomb went off. Phil had deliberately avoided watching, but had just glanced out the window at the rear-view mirror when it happened. The flash seemed to sear his eyeballs, even just seen in reflection, through glass, and for a long moment he saw nothing but after-image while he flew on reflexes.
All Tris saw was Phil's face. Her own tightened, and she clung to her seat with both hands. The shock wave, when it caught them, wasn't as bad as she'd feared, and by that time Phil could see again, fuzzily. In a vague, disassociated way, he wondered if his eyes were permanently damaged.
He looked in the mirror again, and blurred though his vision was, he could see the cloud of dust rising on its stem, bigger and more impressive than he'd expected from something no larger than the artillery shell. It rose and rose.
They continued flying south, without exultation, almost without speaking. Phil visualized Air Force pilots sprinting to fighter planes at Langley Field, and Andrews, and probably Dover. When they reached the broad mouth of the Potomac estuary, he climbed to 500 feet.
The pasture they were looking for on the other side was surrounded by woods, but Phil had no trouble finding it. The landing was rough but not dangerously so. By that time his vision was nearly normal. He taxied the elderly Cessna to the edge of the trees; then they climbed out and, still not talking, hurried to a sagging shed nearby, at the end of a wooded lane. They'd padlocked their old Ford Tempo in it more than two weeks earlier.
The shed was cold, smelled dusty, and Phil felt apprehension as he slid behind the steering wheel. He put the key into the ignition, made sure the transmission was in park, pumped the gas his standard six times for cold morning starts, and looked back through the open door, where Tris stood waiting. Somehow she seemed to think she needed to close it after them, as if they were back home in Ohio and this was their garage.
He turned the key then. Nothing. The starter didn't even grunt, didn't even click! He switched it off again, then back on. Nothing.
He didn't try a third time. Didn't even try to get out of the car. Didn't even swear! The battery's dead, he told himself, the battery's dead. After a minute, Tris came in and looked through the window at him.
"What's the matter? Won't it start?"
And he'd be blind tomorrow; he was sure of it. It would happen in his sleep.
"Phil? Phil, for chrissake! Answer me!"
"It won't start," he said, and somehow got out of the car. "The battery's dead."
They left the car. They left the plane. By now, Phil knew, fighters would be in the air. The Cessna had been picked up and tracked by the radar ring encircling the capital; they knew right where it had landed. Police cars were on the road, headed this way.
Tris led him back into the woods, where they'd have cover. They'd walk parallel to the road, she told herself. Walk till they were well away from here, then hitchhike.
She wished they hadn't been too excited to eat breakfast, or that they'd thought to bring a lunch.
The lane met a blacktop road, and she wasn't sure which way to turn. She should have brought the map from the car, she told herself, and turned to Phil. "Which way do we go?"
Phil didn't answer.
"Phil? Phil! Say something!"
"Either way," he said. "Either way."
She turned right and they hiked on through the woods, keeping the road in sight to her left. It was the first time since she'd known Phil that she'd walked faster than he did. Or that he'd walked slower than she.