once again. He had no illusions about the activities that had gone on in this place over the years or some of the people who had taken part in them, but he was no more inclined to take umbrage at the building simply because stupid or even evil decisions had been made within it than a bishop recalled to Rome would take umbrage at the Vatican because some of its occupants over the centuries had been other than saintly. The Pentagon was just a building, after all. And it had been the center of his professional life for three decades.
Very little had changed in the twelve or thirteen years since he had last set foot within it. The air in the long corridors had the same stale synthetic smell, the lighting fixtures were no more beautiful than they had been and still cast that sickly light, the walls were as drab as ever. One difference he noticed was that the guards at the various checkpoints were much younger—he would easily have believed that they were high-school boys and girls, though he suspected they actually were a little older than that—and some of the security procedures were different, now, too.
These days they screened people to see whether they had biochip implants in their arms, for example. “Sorry,” the Colonel said, grinning. “I’m not that modern.” But they screened him for implants anyway, and very thoroughly. And moved him on through pretty quickly after that, though the other three who had flown with him from California, the ruddy-bearded UCLA professor and the CalTech astronomer with the British accent and that lovely but somewhat dazed young dark-haired woman who had actually been held for a short time as a hostage aboard the alien spaceship, were kept back for more elaborate interrogation, as civilians usually were.
As he approached the meeting room itself, the Colonel began to ratchet himself up a couple of gears, getting himself up to speed for whatever lay ahead.
Once upon a time, some thirty years ago, he had been part of the strategic planning team in Saigon, helping to run a war that could not possibly have been won, coping on a day-by-day basis with the task of tracking down the worms that kept wriggling up through the quicksand and trying to put them in their proper cans, while simultaneously searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. He had distinguished himself pretty considerably in that capacity, which was why he had started his Vietnam tour as a second lieutenant and finished it as a major, with further promotions ahead.
But he had given all that high-powered stuff up, long ago, first for a post-Vietnam doctorate in Asian studies and a teaching appointment at the Academy, and then, after his wife’s death, for the quiet life of a fuddy-duddy walnut farmer in the hills above Santa Barbara. He was, here and now in the charming first decade of the charming twenty-first century, too far out of things to know or care much about the contemporary world, having participated neither in the glorious Net that everybody was plugged into, nor the even newer and glitzier world of biochip implants, nor, in fact, anything else of importance that had happened since about 1995.
Today, though, he needed to reactivate his thinking cap and call upon the smarts that had been at his command in the good old days of the epic battle for the hearts and minds of those pleasant but complicated people out there in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta.
Even if he had been, after all, part of the losing team, that other time.
But through no fault of his own, that time.
The meeting, which was being held in a big, bleak, surprisingly unpretentious conference room on the third floor, had been going on for some hours by the time the Colonel was ushered into it, which was about two in the afternoon eastern time on the day after the arrival of the Entities. Neckties had been loosened all over the room, coats had come off, the male faces were beginning to look stubbly, pyramids and ziggurats of empty white plastic coffee containers were stacked up everywhere. Lloyd Buckley, who came rumbling forward to seize the Colonel’s hand the moment the Colonel entered, had the eroded look of a man who had gone without sleep the night before. Probably that was true of most of them. The Colonel hadn’t had very much himself.
“Anson Carmichael!” Buckley bellowed. “God damn, it’s good to see you again after all this time! Man, you haven’t aged half a minute!”
Buckley had. The Colonel remembered a lot of rumpled brown hair; it was mostly gray now, and there was much less of it. The State Department man had added fifty pounds or so, which surely had brought him up into the 270-280 range; his heavy features had thickened and coarsened, his shrewd gray-green eyes seemed lost now beneath heavy lids circled by puffy rings of fat.
To the room in general Buckley cried, “Gentlemen, ladies, may I introduce Colonel Anson Carmichael III, U.S. Army, Retired—former professor of non-western psychology and Asian linguistics at West Point, and a distinguished military career before that, including, I suppose I should say, a creditable tour of duty during that unfortunate circus we staged long ago in southeast Asia. A brilliant man and a devoted public servant, whose special insights, I know, are going to be invaluable to us today.”
The Colonel wondered what position Buckley held these days that entitled him to make a windy speech like that to people such as these.
Turning back to the Colonel now, Buckley said, “I assume you recognize most if not all of these folks, Anson. But just to avoid any confusions, let me rattle off the cast of characters.”
The Colonel recognized the Vice President, naturally, and the Speaker of the House. The President did not seem to be in the room, nor the Secretary of State. There was an assortment of Navy people and Air Force people and Army people and Marines people, plenty of braid. The Colonel knew most of the Army men at least by sight, and a couple of the Air Force ones. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph F. Steele, gave the Colonel a warm smile. They had served together in Saigon in ’67 under General Matheson, when the Colonel of future times had been a brand-new second lieutenant assigned to the Field Advisory Unit of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, dear old gummed-up MAC-V, as an interpreter, and Joe Steele, four years younger and a green kid just out of West Point, had started out with some exceedingly humble flunky position for MAC-V’s intelligence guys, though he had risen very quickly. And had kept on rising ever since.
Buckley went around the room, making introductions. “The Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gallagher—” A slight, almost inconsequential-looking man, lantern jaw, close-cropped gray hair forming a kind of skullcap on his narrow head, formidable glint of Jesuitical intelligence and dedication in his chilly dark-brown eyes. “The Secretary of Communications, Ms. Crawford—” Elegant woman, coppery glints in her dark hair, a Native American sharpness to her cheekbones and lips. “The Senate Majority Leader, Mr. Bacon of your very own state—” Rangy, athletic-looking fellow, probably a terrific tennis player. “Dr. Kaufman of Harvard’s physics department—” Plump, sleepy-looking, badly dressed. “The Presidential Science Advisor, Dr. Elias—” Impressive woman, stocky, self-contained, a mighty fortress unto herself. The heads of the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Chief of Naval Operations. The Marine Commandant. The top brass of the Army and Air Force as well. The Secretaries of the Army and Navy. And so on and so on, a goodly number in all, the high and the mighty of the land. The Colonel noticed that Buckley had left two men in civilian clothes completely unintroduced, and assumed he had some good reason for that. CIA, he supposed, something like that.
“And your own title these days, Lloyd?” the Colonel asked quietly, when Buckley seemed to have finished.
Buckley seemed nonplussed at that. It was the Vice President who said, while Buckley merely gaped, “Mr. Buckley is the National Security Advisor, Colonel Carmichael.”
Ah, so. A long way up from being an assistant secretary of state for cultural affairs. But of course Buckley had surely been angling for something like this all the time, turning his expertise in anthropology and history and the psychology of nationalistic fervor into credentials for a quasi-military post of Cabinet status in this era of resurgent cultural rivalries with roots going back beyond medieval times. The Colonel murmured something in an apologetic tone about not keeping up with the news as assiduously as he once did, now that he was retired to his hillside walnut groves and his almond trees.
There was action at the conference-room door, now. A flurry among the guards; new people arriving. The rest of the passengers from the Colonel’s cross-country flight filed in at last: Joshua Leonards, the rotund UCLA anthropologist, who with his untrimmed red beard and ratty argyle sweater looked like some nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, and Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, the British astronomer from the CalTech extraterrestrial-intelligence search program, extremely elongated of body and fiercely bright of eye, and the shopping-mall abductee, Margaret Something-or-Other, a petite, rather attractive woman of thirty or so who was either still in shock from her experiences or else was under sedation, because she had said essentially nothing during the entire journey from California.
“Good,” Buckley said. “We’re all here, now. This would be a good moment to bring our newcomers up to date on the situation as it now stands.” He clapped a data wand to his wrist—that was interesting, the Colonel thought,
