Punk picked up his pace with a new surge of momentum.
Jennifer looked back to see the Suburban fall behind momentarily. Then with a grunt and a spin of its wheels, it dug into the snow and zoomed up toward her with no intention of stopping.
Jennifer rode Punk along the narrow trail, the Suburban closing the gap as Punk started to tire, his powerful neck bulging with the strain. Just a little more, she thought, steering him toward the old McAllister place near the country club.
“You know where we’re going, boy,” she told him as he galloped. “We placed second in the Fall Hunter Pace, remember?”
They were riding along Guard Hill Road now, following a low stone wall, the Piney Woods Preserve on the other side, familiar territory to both her and Punk.
But the Suburban was moving up faster from behind.
Jennifer counted her paces. There was a break in the wall coming up. But it was hidden by the piled-up snow. Punk could leap through the gap and break through the snow, but he couldn’t clear the wall if she misjudged the distance.
She kicked Punk and they picked up speed, the break coming up fast.
“Jump, Punk!”
She turned into the wall, gave Punk the right tug on the reins, and closed her eyes. She felt the horse leap into the air and crash through the snow. The ice stung her face, but when she blinked her eyes open, they were into the trees of the preserve, Punk
digging through the snow, his legs working furiously.
Behind her the Suburban tried to stop but slid past the break in the wall on the trail. She heard a crash of metal. But she didn’t dare look back, and galloped on into the woods.
31
Koz was sitting on the gold sofa when Sachs emerged from the bathroom into the NCA commander’s compartment occupied by first-class passengers on a commercial 747. Her hair was wet and slicked back, and he had to admit she did more for the flightsuit that Captain Li had given her than Captain Li herself. Then he was ashamed for even thinking about his commander-in-chief in that way and pushed the thought out of his mind.
“Feeling better?” he asked her. He was sure he had heard her throw up in the bathroom. It was a natural reaction to her stress-inducing meeting with the National Command Authority, although he wasn’t sure she’d admit to something seemingly unpresidential.
“Much.” She sat down in the high-back leather chair at the desk and warily eyed the stack of executive orders he had brought her to sign, along with a steaming mug of hot tea. “Did you make this, Colonel? Or did Doctor Nordquist?”
It was almost funny, but he didn’t dare crack a smile. “Captain Li did, ma’am.”
“OK, I guess I have to trust her now — and you.” Sachs took a sip, exhaled and looked around the compartment. “I just noticed there are no windows in here.”
“Flash effects from nukes, ma’am. They can burn your eyes out. What windows we do have on the plane are made from the same stuff you’ll find in your home microwave door.”
“Of course,” she said with a frown.
At first Koz thought she felt embarrassed by her technical ignorance. Or maybe she thought his microwave remark was as patronizing as Marshall’s coffee order options. But then he decided she was simply sad.
She asked, “Where are we going?”
“We’re following a pre-designated route to avoid enemy detection. We should be out of U.S. airspace shortly.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want us straying from U.S. airspace. We can’t leave.”
Koz muffled his real reaction, namely to lecture her on the realities of airspace and nuclear cloud bursts. But she would probably le soon enough.
Sachs leaned forward and looked at the stack of Presidential Emergency Action Documents on her desk. “More proclamations?”
“You gotta sign them while you can,” Koz said.
Sachs stared at the first one, an order freezing wages, prices and rent. Then she signed with a flourish and said, “And I thought you were all Republicans,” she quipped.
Koz cracked a smile. He was beginning to enjoy having her around, especially when everything else about the world right now felt so rotten.
“This one,” he said, “is guaranteed to warm a liberal’s heart.”
He pushed another classified document across the desk for her to sign. It was a draft bill authorizing the IRS to collect money via a national sales tax of 30 percent. It even waived interest penalties against taxpayers who filed late returns “due to reasonable cause and not due to willful neglect.”
“I’m not a liberal or conservative, Colonel, I’m an American,” she said, signing the order. “And nuclear war seems as reasonable a cause as any for these extreme — and temporary — measures. Anything else?”
Koz slid a thick binder across the desk to her. “The latest National Strategic Target List,” he explained. “It ranks more than forty thousand places and things in China, the Far East and elsewhere deemed worthy of destruction.”
He watched as Sachs tentatively ran her finger down the list, pausing at a target and moving on. He could tell she couldn’t do it, couldn’t let her finger rest on any single item, knowing thousands of human beings would die if she did.
She said, “I guess I had forgotten that the United States has considered China its No. 1 enemy since the end of the Cold War.”
“Until 9/11,” Koz said. “General Marshall made his career at the Pentagon with his quadrennial reports stating that the war on terror in the Middle East had distracted America from containing the real threat in China. By the way, for every target you don’t pick, you might as well put your finger on a map of the United States, because that’s who will suffer instead.”
“Thanks for the information, Colonel.”
“You wanted presidential authority,” he reminded her, and pushed a second operations manual at her, this one thicker than the first. “Now you have it.”
“And what’s this?” Sachs asked, looking overwhelmed.
“The Single Integrated Operational Plan,” he explained. “The plan for destroying the places and things on the target list.”
Sachs thumbed through the pages slowly. “This says that even after we and our enemies exhaust all our nuclear warheads and destroy the planet, America still has a secret reserve of nukes for after Armageddon.”
“That’s right,” said Koz. “The winner will be the one who can continue the fighting and inflict still more damage.”
“But there will be nothing left to destroy! There will be no America left for our bombers or subs to return to.”
Koz said, “They could land or dock at foreign airstrips and ports. As you’ll see, secret treaties with foreign allies would enable our government to political entity even if the United States itself were destroyed.”
“Sure, it just wouldn’t have any people,” Sachs said. “Doesn’t thinking about this all day drive Marshall insane?”
“You have to be a little insane to dream up these nightmares in the first place.”
“So why do we do it?”
“It’s an insane planet.”
She picked up her mug of tea and curiously looked at the decal on the side, which depicted an F-16 fighter jet and the tag line:
