The black bird rose abruptly from its human nest and sailed up to the head of one of the crucified officers. Again, the bird made no attempt to disturb the flesh. It simply perched, fluffing its black feathers over the dead man's hair.
Akiro drew his pistol.
'No,' Noburu said.
But the younger man fired. He missed the bird, which rose skyward with a baffled cry. Under the black wings the dead officer's skull exploded, coming back to life for an instant before its wreckage lolled back down on the officer's chest.
Akiro was shaking. He looked as though he had been abandoned on an ice floe. He held the pistol in his hand, struggling with its purpose.
'Organize a detail,' Noburu said calmly. 'It's time to cut them down.'
At 12:57 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, President Jonathan Waters suffered a massive heart attack. He had slept little over the previous four days, and it had felt wonderful and a little bit strange to slip into the bedclothes beside the steady warmth of his wife. He lost consciousness quickly, descending into a tumult of dreams. His last dream was of his father. President Waters was only a boy, and red-eyed dogs chased him. Up ahead, his father receded in a mist as thick as wet concrete. The boy ran harder and harder, making ever less progress, calling out to the safe, strong man. But his father did not hear him. And the dogs were all around him. He ran as hard as he could, lifting his hands away from the relentless snouts, shouting for his father to come back.
He woke in mortal pain. He called out, 'Dad,' then remembered a whole life and spoke his wife's name once before he died.
The Americans came down from the meager hills that had been elevated with the name Ural Mountains. Their war machines sailed south over the wastes, registering here and there the passing of a village better-suited as a museum of poverty and premodernity than as a habitat for contemporary man. The war had not yet reached these hamlets, and smoke rose from chimneys instead of from ruins. The M-100s' on-board sensors registered defunct tractors in place of tanks. The snow had covered the last traces of the roads. The isolated settlements appeared as gray islands in an arctic sea. The sagging houses looked so thoroughly lost that it seemed certain the war would continue to pass them by as surely as had indoor plumbing.
It struck Taylor that this was no land over which to fight a war. It was merely a place of passage, through which the great forgotten warriors of the East had passed, illiterate geniuses whose people wove the record of their triumphs into rugs or nicked out their chronicles in silver and brass. Then the white-bloused Russians had marched from west to east, for God and the Czar, bringing the tribesmen alphabets and artillery.
Objectively speaking, this was no land over which to fight a war. And yet, Taylor had seen enough of war to know that a man would always love the barren plains or hills where he was born, and that he would pass that love on to his sons with his blood, even in captivity. Anyway, men never really needed much of an excuse to fight.
Taylor felt weary. The excitement of planning was over, the thrill of designing the impossible in such a way that it came to seem inevitable. For the present, there was only a long, dull route to fly, and he felt the big physical tiredness in his limbs, made heavier by the hard usage of a lifetime.
Hours to fly. Until the refueling stop. Then an even greater distance until they reached the objective. Taylor glanced out over the frozen wastes. It was a long way from Africa, the touchstone of his life.
He slumped back in his seat.
'Flapper,' he said to his copilot, 'you've got the wheel. I need a little rest.'
Vice President Maddox looked warily from face to face. The new chair did not feel very comfortable.
'The Chief Justice is on her way, sir,' the White House Chief of Staff said. There was a totally new tone of respect in his voice.
Maddox considered the man. Nope. He would not do. He was irredeemably a Waters man, and he had been carelessly inattentive of the Vice President, whom he had rather too publicly termed a 'hick with a college degree.' Nope. A new White House Chief of Staff would be one of the first appointees.
'Martin,' Maddox said to the man whose fate had just been decided, 'would you mind looking in on Mrs. Waters one more time? See if she isn't feeling just a tad more in possession of herself.' He thought of the famous old pictures of Jackie Kennedy in pink by a new president's side. 'I do think the public would be reassured if she felt up to putting in an appearance at the swearing-in.'
'Yes, sir.' And he was gone.
Maddox looked around the table. Serious bunch. Nobody you'd want to take along to the hunting cabin for a weekend.
'About that other thing,' he said.
'Yes, sir,' the secretary of state jumped in. It was obvious to Maddox that the man had been waiting impatiently for an opportunity to continue his earlier tutorial. Damned Yankees, Maddox thought. Never do learn. 'We cannot afford to waste any more time,' the whitehaired diplomat continued. 'You must understand, sir. President Waters was ill, and probably in physical pain, when he made his decision. Why, the stress alone was enough to unbalance a man. And remember Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. Bad health makes for bad decisions.'
'I don't know,' Maddox said slowly. 'I'm a fighting kind of guy. I don't know whether the American people want a president' — the word had an entirely new feel on the tongue—'who's afraid to put up his dukes.'
'It isn't a matter of
Maddox scanned beyond the secretary of state. Didn't see a face in the room he could trust. He had nurtured a kind of liking for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but that was only because the man resembled an old hunting dog he'd had as a boy.
'What do you have to say there, General?'
The chairman alerted to the scent. 'Mr. Vice President,' he said in the bluff voice that generals like to wear in Washington, 'I want to be perfectly honest with you. I'm an old soldier. I don't mind a good dustup. But, frankly, this mission has only the slightest chance of success — and it may well prove a great embarrassment.' Maddox narrowed his eyes. Sometimes a dog just got so old and tired it couldn't hunt no more. And you had to put it down.
Maddox smiled. 'Well, you all have to give me your best advice on this matter. My only experience with this sort of thing was a year in military school. My daddy sent me there to put some manners on me.' His smile ripened into a grin. ''Not sure it took. Anyhow, I'm afraid I'm just wandering around in the dark on all this. I do need good advice.' He waved his shake-hands grin like a bright little flag. 'Why. I've been out there in California, for God's sake.'
'Mr. President.' the secretary of state resumed, 'while you were on the Coast, the President was under a great deal of pressure. He began to make—'
The door opened. Mrs. Waters stepped into the room, eyes dead. She was followed by the Chief Justice, the White House Chief of Staff, and a staff photographer. Maddox jumped to his feet.
'Sir,' the secretary of state hissed, 'there's very little time. We've got to stop—'
'Just hold your horses,' Maddox snapped. Then he set his face in an expression of sympathy as perfect as a black silk tie and walked open-armed toward the President's widow.
'Are you sure this is the right place?' Taylor asked. Kozlov noted that the American was trying to maintain a professional demeanor, but the undertones of impatience and disgust in his voice were unmistakable. 'Is there any chance we've got the wrong coordinates?'
Kozlov looked down at the monitor displaying a visual survey of the designated refueling site. The steppe was embarrassingly empty. Where Soviet refueling vehicles should have been waiting, there was only the gray earth, naked and cold, between the Caspian Sea just to the south and the sea of snow to the north. Pressed to give the place a name, Kozlov would have called it 'No-man's-land.' He looked back up. Into Taylor's disfigured, disapproving face.
