“I guess you would,” the mercenary said. “I tell you where she is, I die easy—is that it?”
“You got it.”
“Tremont. Just outside Pekin.” The mercenary cut his eyes to Ike. “Long time, Mississippi boy.”
“It’s growing very short, Longchamp.”
“We went through UDT together, Ike.”
“That don’t make us brothers.”
“I don’t think you can do it, nigger-lover,” the onetime UDT man said with a grin.
He was still grinning as Ike shot him through the heart with a silenced .22 Colt Woodsman.
“I reckon he figured camaraderie went further than it oughtta,” the ex-Green Beret said.
“He never was worth a shit at figurin,’” Ike said. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s stop dancing, General,” Ben said. “Sit down and put the cards face up.”
The AF general smiled and removed a small boxlike object from his briefcase.
Ben ruefully returned the man’s smile.
Altamont began a search with the dial until Ben stopped him with a curt slash of his hand. “I’m taping, General.” He punched a button on his desk. “Stop taping, Susie.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“Am I to take you at your word, Mr. President?”
“I don’t lie, General.”
The general studied Ben’s face for several long seconds. “All right, sir. I believe you.”
“Why so hinky about my taping our conversation?”
“You have… ah… shall we say, more than your share of people who dislike you intensely.”
“To say the least. That isn’t news.”
“You are aware of my brother backing Lowry and Cody and Hartline?”
“Yes.”
“He is not loyal to you, sir.”
“Are you?”
Altamont smiled. “Yes, sir—believe it or not. I was the one feeding false information to my brother and his… ah… colleagues.”
Rain began drumming on the window, the drops mixed with ice and sleet. The winter sky darkened, casting a shadowy pall on the Oval Office and its occupants. Ben waited.
“I want you to know I am not a traitor to my country, sir. I was one of those who met in the Missouri lodge, back in ‘88. Just before the bombings.”
“Yes, I know.”
Tension, heavy and ominous, hung in the huge room as the room filled with men in groups of twos and threes. Each man seemed to know exactly where to sit, although no name tag designated individual place. The men looked at each other, nodded, and took their places at the huge square table.
The men were military. Line officers and combat-experienced chiefs and sergeants. Career men.
There were generals and colonels of all branches; fifteen sergeant majors and master chiefs making up the enlisted complement.
Guards were sentried around the two hundred acres of Missouri hill country. They wore sidearms in shoulder holsters under their jackets.
“Who ordered this low alert the press is talking about?” the question was tossed out.
“It came out of the Joint Chiefs. It’s confused the hell out of a lot of units and caused several hundred thousand men to be shifted around, out of standard position. Goddamn, it’s going to be days before they get back to normal. We not only don’t know who issued the orders, but why.”
“Maybe to get us out of position for the big push?”
“I thought we had more time—months even?”
“Something’s happened to cause them to speed up their timetable,” General Vern Saunders of the Army said. “That means we’ve got to move very quickly.”
“Hell, Vern,” General Driskill of the Marine Corps said, “what can we do… really? We’re up against it. We all
Admiral Mullens of the Navy looked around him, meeting all eyes. “I don’t think we dare move.”
Sergeant major of the Army, Parley, stirred.
The admiral said, “If you have something on your mind, Sergeant Major, say it. We’re all equal here.”
“Damned if that’s so!” a Marine sergeant major said.
Laughter.
Parley said, “I don’t believe we can afford to move. But if we don’t, what do we do—just sit on our hands and wait for war?”
“I think it’s out of our hands,” Admiral Newcomb of the Coast Guard said. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If we do expose the location of the sub—where we
“Which is a bad joke,” Sergeant Major Rogers of the Marine Corps said in disgust. “Russia’s still got us outgunned two to one in missiles of the conventional nuclear type. God only knows how many germ-type warheads they have.” He forced a grin. “Of course, we have a few of those ourselves. Jesus! Thirty damned guys control the fate of the entire world. Even worse than that, if our intelligence is correct, it’s a double double cross.”
Master Chief Petty Officer Franklin, of the Navy, looked across the table. “Admiral? Do you—any of you— know for sure just who we can trust?”
The admiral shook his head. “No, not really. We don’t know how many of our own people are in on this… caper.”
“You mean, sir,” a colonel asked, “one of
“I would say the odds are better than even that is true.”
A Special Forces colonel said, “General? You think some of my people are involved in this?”
“No,” General Saunders said. “Our intelligence people—of all services—seem to agree on one point: no special troops involved. But this touches all branches of the service, not just in this country, but
“Then Bull and Adams are really alive?”
“Yes. I talked with Bull. It came as quite a shock to me.”
A master chief said, as much to himself as to those around him, “I really don’t understand what they have to do with this… operation.”
“Really… neither do we,” an admiral admitted. “But we do have these facts, one of which is obvious: Bull and Adams faked their deaths years ago, in ‘Nam; we know they are both superpatriots, Adams more than Bull when it comes to liberal-hating. All right. We put together this hypothesis: Adams and Bull had a plan to overthrow the government—if it came to that—using civilian… well, rebels, let’s call them, along with selected units of the military. Took years to put all this together. But the use of civilian rebels failed; couldn’t get enough of them in time. We think. We know for a fact that many ex-members of the Hell Hounds turned them down cold.”
“How many men do they have?”
“Five to six thousand, at the most. We think.”
“That’s still a lot of people. And knowing Bull and Adams, those men are trained guerrilla fighters. How have they managed to keep that many people secret for so long?”
The admiral allowed himself a tight smile. “You didn’t know the Bull, did you?”
“No, sir.”
“If you had known either of them, you wouldn’t have asked.”
“I knew both of them,” a Ranger colonel said. “If they even suspected a member of any of their units was a traitor, they would not hesitate to kill them—war or peace.”
