site, looked it over, learned the ground. This time he located the street, but when he realized its isolation he stayed away and waited for evening. He wanted no one in Jacaranda Drive remembering that they'd seen the van twice, the first time in clear daylight.
Vaggan had tuned in the all-news station, carried the radio outside, and put it on the concrete retaining wall beside his second cup of coffee. Like everything Vaggan owned which required power, the radio was battery- operated. In the future as Vaggan anticipated it, the radio battery would have to last only about three weeks after the day. Broadcasting would be restored within hours after the bombs—and the devastating electrical surge of the nuclear explosions—had erased civilization's grid of electrical power. The emergency generators would take over, and the frequencies would be babbling with panic: civil defense orders and, mostly, cries for help. Vaggan estimated that phase would last several weeks and then die away, and there would be no more use for his radio receiver. For that brief but important period, Vaggan kept four silicon radio batteries in a little box in his freezer. More than enough.
The local news led with an account of Vaggan's operation. Vaggan sipped his coffee and listened.
'Police report a bizarre crime in Beverly Hills—with TV talk show host Jay Leonard maimed by an intruder who broke into his palatial home and drove staples through his ears.
'Police say the intruder called local newspapers and television stations after the attack to tell them that Leonard was being taken to the emergency room at Beverly Hills General. Leonard was reported in good condition at the hospital but was not available for comment. Here's what Detective Lieutenant Allen Bizett of the lapd had to say.'
Bizett said very little, reporting in a gravelly voice that Leonard said he didn't know the motive of the attack, that he had received an anonymous telephone threat, and that he had hired a guard to protect him. Bizett said the guard had been overcome by the intruder, who had also killed two guard dogs. He described the suspect as a 'large Caucasian male.'
With that subject exhausted, the announcer skipped to the continued hunt for an armed robber who had killed a customer and wounded a clerk in a convenience store robbery the day before, and from that to the record-breaking traffic snarl on the San Diego Freeway caused by a two-truck accident. The item had been brief, but it had been enough, and it would be bigger for both the afternoon papers and the evening TV shows. They'd have the dogs' head business, with the bodies missing, and more of the odd stuff he'd worked in, and his telephone calls, and that would give them the motive.
Enough to earn him his bonus, but he'd never had any doubt of earning that.
He finished the coffee, considered having another cup, rejected the idea. Coffee was his only deviation from his father's rule. He'd slipped into the habit his first year at West Point and rationalized its use as a stimulant his nervous system needed. Even so, even now, twenty years since the Commander had last spoken to him, he drank with a sense of uneasiness he'd never quite defined. 'Weakness,' the Commander had said, sitting across the breakfast table. 'People make being a child an excuse for it. But it's no excuse. In Sparta they started their males at the age of eight. Took 'em away from the women. Enduring the pain. Enduring the cold. Enduring hunger. Weeding out the weakness. We encourage weakness.' Vaggan could see it clearly. His father in his perfect whites, his bristling blond hair, his trim mustache, his row of ribbons. His blue eyes staring at Vaggan, proud of Vaggan, teaching Vaggan to be strong. The thought led Vaggan, as it almost always did, into ground he didn't want to enter: to West Point, and being caught, and to Roser, Cadet Captain Roser. Vaggan considered it again—just a glance at the memory for something that might have been overlooked. No. Nothing changed. The decision was correct: to kill Roser quickly, before he could make any report. The tactic had been proper. The blow with the soft-ball bat should have been both lethal and untraceable. But somehow Roser hadn't died. Expulsion hadn't really mattered. The Point had been a disappointment, with its endless homilies about the old, dead verities which were no longer verities—if they ever had been. But the report had gone to the Commander. And the Commander had sent the telegram.
i have buried you beside the woman.
Vaggan hadn't known the woman. She had borne him. She must have given him the genes that accounted for his size, because the Commander was a small man. But even his earliest memories did not include her. The Commander had never mentioned her. Asking the Commander was unthinkable.
The newscaster was talking about Berlin, a subject that always caught Vaggan's attention. The Commander had believed it would begin over Berlin and Vaggan never doubted it. But this item was inconsequential—a vote of confidence in the Bundestag. And so was the rest of the newscast. The avalanche would not begin today. And so he had finished his coffee, and made a quick check of his hillside and the redoubt he was building into it, and—when the time was right—had left to find Jacaranda Drive, and now he was facing this drunken Indian who was grinning at him foolishly and ignoring his order to leave.
'Beat it,' Vaggan repeated. 'Or you're spending the night in the tank.'
The Indian said something in Navajo and laughed. He walked around Vaggan's van, opened the passenger side door, and climbed in.
'Son of a bitch,' Vaggan snarled. He would have to deal with the Indian the hard way, apparently, which would take time and maybe even attract attention. But with any luck he could pull him out by the feet, whack him, and be done with it and gone with the girl with no problems. It was almost dark, and that would help. He rushed around the van, jerking the pistol from under his belt.
He saw what was coming far too late to avoid it. A split-second awareness of the Indian launched out of the van door, the flashlight swinging, and then the burst of pain. He had time only for reflex action. His reflexes were fine, but they only flinched him away from the full force of the blow. The flashlight—four D batteries in a heavy Bakelite tube—smashed against his upper jaw, staggered him away from the door, slammed him into the side of the van.
The shock of the blow blinded him for a moment, caused him to lose awareness. Then he was on the ground, the Indian atop him. Vaggan reacted with explosive violence before the Indian could hit him again. He grabbed the man's elbow, jerked, twisted his body. The blow missed.
After that it was no contest. Vaggan weighed himself every morning just before he began his routine of pre- breakfast exercises. That morning he had weighed 225 pounds—three pounds off the weight he considered his standard. All of it was bone, muscle, and gristle, conditioned and disciplined by a regimen the Commander had started him on before he could remember. In fact, his very first memory of this part of his life was the time he had cried. He had been doing leg lifts, the Commander standing over him, the Commander's voice chanting, 'Again, again, again, again…' and the pain of the straining muscles had come through the haze of his fatigue and started his tear ducts flowing. He hadn't been able to control it, and the Commander had noticed, and it had been an experience of searing shame. 'It doesn't help you if it doesn't hurt you,' the Commander always said. The pain of that experience had taught him to control his tears. Vaggan had never cried again.
Now he made no sound at all. The Indian was quick. The Indian was strong for his size. The Indian definitely was not drunk. That illusion had vanished from Vaggan's mind with the pain of the blow. But the Indian was
